Related papers: nmT5 -- Is parallel data still relevant for pre-tr…

Despite the known limitations, most machine translation systems today still operate on the sentence-level. One reason for this is, that most parallel training data is only sentence-level aligned, without document-level meta information…

Sequence-to-sequence (S2S) pre-training using large monolingual data is known to improve performance for various S2S NLP tasks in low-resource settings. However, large monolingual corpora might not always be available for the languages of…

Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) has recently been investigated from different aspects (e.g., pivot translation, zero-shot translation, fine-tuning, or training from scratch) and in different settings (e.g., rich resource and…

Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether it is still helpful to add the self-training method in the pre-training step and the fine-tuning step. Towards…

Improving neural machine translation (NMT) models using the back-translations of the monolingual target data (synthetic parallel data) is currently the state-of-the-art approach for training improved translation systems. The quality of the…

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with cross-lingual tasks due to data imbalances between high-resource and low-resource languages, as well as monolingual bias in pre-training. Existing methods, such as bilingual…

Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual applications, as…

Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and transfer learning for natural language processing (NLP), few works have systematically studied the effect of scaling up the number of tasks during pre-training. Towards this goal, this…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant disparities in performance across languages, primarily benefiting high-resource languages while marginalizing underrepresented ones. Continual Pretraining (CPT) has emerged as a promising…

Current state-of-the-art NLP systems use large neural networks that require lots of computational resources for training. Inspired by human knowledge acquisition, researchers have proposed curriculum learning, - sequencing of tasks…

Transfer learning based on pretraining language models on a large amount of raw data has become a new norm to reach state-of-the-art performance in NLP. Still, it remains unclear how this approach should be applied for unseen languages that…

Large language models show compelling performance on reasoning tasks but they tend to perform much worse in languages other than English. This is unsurprising given that their training data largely consists of English text and instructions.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted and deployed worldwide for a broad variety of applications. However, ensuring their safe use remains a significant challenge. Preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms…

NMT systems trained on Pre-trained Multilingual Sequence-Sequence (PMSS) models flounder when sufficient amounts of parallel data is not available for fine-tuning. This specifically holds for languages missing/under-represented in these…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling multilingual machine translation (MMT). In this paper, we systematically investigate the advantages and challenges of LLMs for MMT by answering two questions:…

The successful adaptation of multilingual language models (LMs) to a specific language-task pair critically depends on the availability of data tailored for that condition. While cross-lingual transfer (XLT) methods have contributed to…

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) aims at boosting the overall performance of each individual task by leveraging useful information contained in multiple related tasks. It has shown great success in natural language processing (NLP). Currently, a…

Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT), yet scaling to many languages while keeping quality robust across directions remains challenging. In this paper, we identify a failure mode of…

Multi-task learning is to improve the performance of the model by transferring and exploiting common knowledge among tasks. Existing MTL works mainly focus on the scenario where label sets among multiple tasks (MTs) are usually the same,…

Multi-token prediction (MTP) is a recently proposed pre-training objective for language models. Rather than predicting only the next token (NTP), MTP predicts the next $k$ tokens at each prediction step, using multiple prediction heads. MTP…