Related papers: On Language Models for Creoles
Nigeria is a multilingual country with 500+ languages. Naija is a Nigerian Pidgin spoken by approximately 120M speakers and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo). Although it has mainly been a spoken…
Natural Language Processing is a crucial frontier in artificial intelligence, with broad applications in many areas, including public health, agriculture, education, and commerce. However, due to the lack of substantial linguistic…
A systematic, comparative investigation into the effects of low-quality data reveals a stark spectrum of robustness across modern probabilistic models. We find that autoregressive language models, from token prediction to…
Real world data differs radically from the benchmark corpora we use in natural language processing (NLP). As soon as we apply our technologies to the real world, performance drops. The reason for this problem is obvious: NLP models are…
We present NN-Rank, an algorithm for ranking source languages for cross-lingual transfer, which leverages hidden representations from multilingual models and unlabeled target-language data. We experiment with two pretrained multilingual…
While recurrent models have been effective in NLP tasks, their performance on context-free languages (CFLs) has been found to be quite weak. Given that CFLs are believed to capture important phenomena such as hierarchical structure in…
Many recent perturbation studies have found unintuitive results on what does and does not matter when performing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in English. Coding properties, such as the order of words, can often be removed…
African American English (AAE) presents unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP). This research systematically compares the performance of available NLP models--rule-based, transformer-based, and large language models…
Cross-lingual transfer, where a high-resource transfer language is used to improve the accuracy of a low-resource task language, is now an invaluable tool for improving performance of natural language processing (NLP) on low-resource…
There is an increasing amount of evidence that in cases with little or no data in a target language, training on a different language can yield surprisingly good results. However, currently there are no established guidelines for choosing…
Stemming from the limited availability of datasets and textual resources for low-resource languages such as isiZulu, there is a significant need to be able to harness knowledge from pre-trained models to improve low resource machine…
Cross-lingual word embeddings transfer knowledge between languages: models trained on high-resource languages can predict in low-resource languages. We introduce CLIME, an interactive system to quickly refine cross-lingual word embeddings…
Realignment is a promising strategy to improve cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models. However, empirical results are mixed and often unreliable, particularly for typologically distant or low-resource languages (LRLs)…
Evaluation metrics that are not robust to dialect variation make it impossible to tell how well systems perform for many groups of users, and can even penalize systems for producing text in lower-resource dialects. However, currently, there…
This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the use of diffusion models in natural language processing (NLP). Diffusion models are a class of mathematical models that aim to capture the diffusion of information or signals across a…
Cross-lingual model transfer is a compelling and popular method for predicting annotations in a low-resource language, whereby parallel corpora provide a bridge to a high-resource language and its associated annotated corpora. However,…
In this article, we seek to answer the following question: could data duplication be useful in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for languages with limited computational resources? In this type of languages (or $\pi$-languages), corpora…
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing. Yet, their predominantly English-centric training has led to biases and performance disparities across languages. This imbalance marginalizes minoritized languages,…
Transfer learning has led to large gains in performance for nearly all NLP tasks while making downstream models easier and faster to train. This has also been extended to low-resourced languages, with some success. We investigate the…
Recent advances in word embeddings and language models use large-scale, unlabelled data and self-supervised learning to boost NLP performance. Multilingual models, often trained on web-sourced data like Wikipedia, face challenges: few…