31 accepted papers
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to be susceptible to perturbations to the input text, but existing works do not explicitly focus on linguistically grounded attacks, which are subtle and more prevalent in nature. In this paper, we study whether PLMs are agnostic to linguistically grounde…
Translating cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural
Evaluating machine-generated text remains a significant challenge in NLP, especially for non-English languages. Current methodologies, including automated metrics, human assessments, and LLM-based evaluations, predominantly focus on English, revealing a significant gap in multilingual evaluation fra…
Cross-lingual transfer from related high-resource languages is a well-established strategy to enhance low-resource language technologies. Prior work has shown that adapters show promise for, e.g., improving low-resource machine translation (MT). In this work, we investigate an adapter souping method…
This work introduces PrahokBART, a compact pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model trained from scratch for Khmer using carefully curated Khmer and English corpora. We focus on improving the pre-training corpus quality and addressing the linguistic issues of Khmer, which are ignored in existing multi…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong multilingual performance despite being predominantly trained on English-centric corpora. This raises a fundamental question: How do LLMs achieve such multilingual capabilities? Focusing on languages written in non-Roman scripts, we investigate the role of…
Automatically synthesizing figures from text captions is a compelling capability. However, achieving high geometric precision and editability requires representing figures as graphics programs in languages like TikZ, and aligned training data (i.e., graphics programs with captions) remains scarce. M…
Speech translation for Indian languages remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of large-scale, publicly available datasets that capture the linguistic diversity and domain coverage essential for real-world applications. Existing datasets cover a fraction of Indian languages and lack the brea…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicul…
Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models through positional encodings. This prompts a fundamental in…
Recent interest has surged in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT) via in-context learning (ICL) (Vilar et al., 2023). Most prior studies primarily focus on optimizing translation quality, with limited attention to understanding the specific aspects of ICL that influen…
Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images th…
While machine translation evaluation has been studied primarily for high-resource languages, there has been a recent interest in evaluation for low-resource languages due to the increasing availability of data and models. In this paper, we focus on a zero-shot evaluation setting focusing on low-reso…
Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the developm…
A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (M…
IEEE Automatic Mean Opinion Score (MOS) prediction is employed to evaluate the quality of synthetic speech. This study extends the application of predicted MOS to the task of Fake Audio Detection (FAD) as we expect that MOS can be used to assess how close synthesized speech is to the natural human v…
The Nguni languages have over 20 million home language speakers in South Africa. There has been considerable growth in the datasets for Nguni languages, but so far no analysis of the performance of NLP models for these languages has been reported across languages and tasks. In this paper we study pr…
LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capability for understanding semantics, but their understanding of pragmatics is not well studied. To this end, we release a Pragmatics Understanding Benchmark (PUB) dataset consisting of fourteen tasks in four pragmatics phenomena, namely; Implicature, Presuppositi…
In this paper, we explore the utility of Translationese as synthetic data created using machine translation for pre-training language models (LMs) for low-resource languages (LRLs). Our simple methodology consists of translating large amounts of web-crawled monolingual documents (clean) into the LRL…
This study addresses the challenge of extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to non-English languages, specifically those using non-Roman scripts. We propose an approach that utilizes the romanized form of text as an interface for LLMs, hypothesizing that its frequent informal use and shared tokens…
Large language models have demonstrated the capability to perform on machine translation when the input is prompted with a few examples (in-context learning). Translation quality depends on various features of the selected examples, such as their quality and relevance, but previous work has predomi…
This study investigates machine translation between related languages i.e., languages within the same family that share linguistic characteristics such as word order and lexical similarity. Machine translation through few-shot prompting leverages a small set of translation pair examples to generate…
This paper studies the impact of layer normalization (LayerNorm) on zero-shot translation (ZST). Recent efforts for ZST often utilize the Transformer architecture as the backbone, with LayerNorm at the input of layers (PreNorm) set as the default. However, Xu et al. (2019) has revealed that PreNorm…
The rapid growth of machine translation (MT) systems necessitates meta-evaluations of evaluation metrics to enable selection of those that best reflect MT quality. Unfortunately, most meta-evaluation studies focus on European languages, the observations for which may not always apply to other langua…
Automatic speech translation is sensitive to speech recognition errors, but in a multilingual scenario, the same content may be available in various languages via simultaneous interpreting, dubbing or subtitling. In this paper, we hypothesize that leveraging multiple sources will improve translation…
In this paper we present FeatureBART, a linguistically motivated sequence-to-sequence monolingual pre-training strategy in which syntactic features such as lemma, part-of-speech and dependency labels are incorporated into the span prediction based pre-training framework (BART). These automatically e…
In this paper, we study pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models for a group of related languages, with a focus on Indic languages. We present IndicBART, a multilingual, sequence-to-sequence pre-trained model focusing on 11 Indic languages and English. IndicBART utilizes the orthographic similarity b…
Natural Language Generation (NLG) for non-English languages is hampered by the scarcity of datasets in these languages. We present the IndicNLG Benchmark, a collection of datasets for benchmarking NLG for 11 Indic languages. We focus on five diverse tasks, namely, biography generation using Wikipedi…
Word alignment has proven to benefit many-to-many neural machine translation (NMT). However, high-quality ground-truth bilingual dictionaries were used for pre-editing in previous methods, which are unavailable for most language pairs. Meanwhile, the contrastive objective can implicitly utilize auto…
Cognates are variants of the same lexical form across different languages; for example “fonema” in Spanish and “phoneme” in English are cognates, both of which mean “a unit of sound”. The task of automatic detection of cognates among any two languages can help downstream NLP tasks such as Cross-ling…
In this study, linguistic knowledge at different levels are incorporated into the neural machine translation (NMT) framework to improve translation quality for language pairs with extremely limited data. Integrating manually designed or automatically extracted features into the NMT framework is know…