15 accepted papers
While large reasoning models have shown remarkable ability to generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) in English, we still lack understanding of how these long-form reasoning abilities transfer to the vast majority of the world’s languages. In this work, we systematically investigate four key stages…
Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce and exacerbate the social biases present in their training data, and resources to quantify this issue are limited. While research has attempted to identify and mitigate such biases, most efforts have been concentrated around English, lagging the rapid advanceme…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to generate relevant responses from a handful of task demonstrations in the prompt. Prior studies have suggested two different explanations for the mechanisms behind ICL: induction heads that find an…
Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students face significant barriers in accessing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, notably due to the scarcity of STEM resources in signed languages. To help address this, we introduce ASL STEM Wiki: a parallel corpus of 254 Wikipedia a…
Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes i…
In translation, a concept represented by a single word in a source language can have multiple variations in a target language. The task of lexical selection requires using context to identify which variation is most appropriate for a source text. We work with native speakers of nine languages to cre…
Although proper handling of discourse significantly contributes to the quality of machine translation (MT), these improvements are not adequately measured in common translation quality metrics. Recent works in context-aware MT attempt to target a small set of discourse phenomena during evaluation, h…
Signed languages are the primary means of communication for many deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Since signed languages exhibit all the fundamental linguistic properties of natural language, we believe that tools and theories of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are crucial towards its modelin…
Model interpretability methods are often used to explain NLP model decisions on tasks such as text classification, where the output space is relatively small. However, when applied to language generation, where the output space often consists of tens of thousands of tokens, these methods are unable…
Context-aware machine translation models are designed to leverage contextual information, but often fail to do so. As a result, they inaccurately disambiguate pronouns and polysemous words that require context for resolution. In this paper, we ask several questions: What contexts do human translator…
Signed languages are the primary means of communication for many deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Since signed languages exhibit all the fundamental linguistic properties of natural language, we believe that tools and theories of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are crucial towards its modelin…
Recent work in neural machine translation has demonstrated both the necessity and feasibility of using inter-sentential context, context from sentences other than those currently being translated. However, while many current methods present model architectures that theoretically can use this extra c…
Coreference resolution is key to many natural language processing tasks and yet has been relatively unexplored in Sign Language Processing. In signed languages, space is primarily used to establish reference. Solving coreference resolution for signed languages would not only enable higher-level Sign…
Learning fine-grained distinctions between vocabulary items is a key challenge in learning a new language. For example, the noun “wall” has different lexical manifestations in Spanish – “pared” refers to an indoor wall while “muro” refers to an outside wall. However, this variety of lexical distinct…
Sign Language Translation (SLT) first uses a Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system to extract sign language glosses from videos. Then, a translation system generates spoken language translations from the sign language glosses. This paper focuses on the translation system and introduces the STMC-Tra…