Related papers: Investigating Post-pretraining Representation Alig…

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models for downstream tasks has become a norm for NLP. Recently it is found that intermediate training based on high-level inference tasks such as Question Answering (QA) can improve the performance of some…

Large language models (LLMs) provide detailed and impressive responses to queries in English. However, are they really consistent at responding to the same query in other languages? The popular way of evaluating for multilingual performance…

We study the problem of multilingual masked language modeling, i.e. the training of a single model on concatenated text from multiple languages, and present a detailed study of several factors that influence why these models are so…

We propose a pre-training objective based on question answering (QA) for learning general-purpose contextual representations, motivated by the intuition that the representation of a phrase in a passage should encode all questions that the…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Large language models (LLMs) need to serve everyone, including a global majority of non-English speakers. However, most LLMs today, and open LLMs in particular, are often intended for use in just English (e.g. Llama2, Mistral) or a small…

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task.…

Multilingual machine translation systems aim to make knowledge accessible across languages, yet learning effective cross-lingual representations remains challenging. These challenges are especially pronounced for low-resource languages,…

The veracity of a factoid is largely independent of the language it is written in. However, language models are inconsistent in their ability to answer the same factual question across languages. This raises questions about how LLMs…

The success of pretrained cross-lingual language models relies on two essential abilities, i.e., generalization ability for learning downstream tasks in a source language, and cross-lingual transferability for transferring the task…

Recent work on speech representation models jointly pre-trained with text has demonstrated the potential of improving speech representations by encoding speech and text in a shared space. In this paper, we leverage such shared…

Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

We propose EXAMS -- a new benchmark dataset for cross-lingual and multilingual question answering for high school examinations. We collected more than 24,000 high-quality high school exam questions in 16 languages, covering 8 language…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. In this paper, we closely examine the reasons behind this phenomenon, focusing on the pre-training…

Cross-lingual context retrieval (extracting contextual information in one language based on requests in another) is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs)…

Deep learning based question answering (QA) on English documents has achieved success because there is a large amount of English training examples. However, for most languages, training examples for high-quality QA models are not available.…

Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA---a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs. The languages…

Preference optimization techniques have become a standard final stage for training state-of-art large language models (LLMs). However, despite widespread adoption, the vast majority of work to-date has focused on first-class citizen…

Recent models such as XLS-R and Whisper have made multilingual speech technologies more accessible by pre-training on audio from around 100 spoken languages each. However, there are thousands of spoken languages worldwide, and adapting to…