Related papers: BPE vs. Morphological Segmentation: A Case Study o…

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) trained on 104 languages has shown surprisingly good cross-lingual performance on several NLP tasks, even without explicit cross-lingual signals. However, these evaluations have focused on cross-lingual transfer…

Recent advents in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have shown improvements in low-resource language (LRL) translation tasks. In this work, we benchmark NMT between English and five African LRL pairs (Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo,…

One of the challenges with finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is that their tokenizer is optimized for the language(s) it was pretrained on, but brittle when it comes to previously unseen variations in the data. This can for…

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in…

The paper continues the study of partitioning based inference of heuristics for search in the context of solving the Most Probable Explanation task in Bayesian Networks. We compare two systematic Branch and Bound search algorithms, BBBT…

In this paper, we propose to extend the recently introduced model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML) for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). We frame low-resource translation as a meta-learning problem, and we learn to adapt…

The lack of parallel data for many language pairs is an important challenge to statistical machine translation (SMT). One common solution is to pivot through a third language for which there exist parallel corpora with the source and target…

Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly…

Breaking down a document or a conversation into multiple contiguous segments based on its semantic structure is an important and challenging problem in NLP, which can assist many downstream tasks. However, current works on topic…

Morphology in unbalanced languages remains a big challenge in the context of machine translation. In this paper, we propose to de-couple machine translation from morphology generation in order to better deal with the problem. We investigate…

Homographs, words with different meanings but the same surface form, have long caused difficulty for machine translation systems, as it is difficult to select the correct translation based on the context. However, with the advent of neural…

Multilingual semantic parsing is a cost-effective method that allows a single model to understand different languages. However, researchers face a great imbalance of availability of training data, with English being resource rich, and other…

State-of-the-art machine translation (MT) systems are typically trained to generate the "standard" target language; however, many languages have multiple varieties (regional varieties, dialects, sociolects, non-native varieties) that are…

A number of morphology-based word embedding models were introduced in recent years. However, their evaluation was mostly limited to English, which is known to be a morphologically simple language. In this paper, we explore whether and to…

Computational morphology handles the language processing at the word level. It is one of the foundational tasks in the NLP pipeline for the development of higher level NLP applications. It mainly deals with the processing of words and word…

Contemporary multilingual dependency parsers can parse a diverse set of languages, but for Morphologically Rich Languages (MRLs), performance is attested to be lower than other languages. The key challenge is that, due to high morphological…

Morphology is a crucial factor for multilingual language modeling as it poses direct challenges for tokenization. Here, we seek to understand how tokenization influences the morphological knowledge encoded in multilingual language models.…

Natural language processing (NLP) can be done using either top-down (theory driven) and bottom-up (data driven) approaches, which we call mechanistic and phenomenological respectively. The approaches are frequently considered to stand in…

Cross-lingual alignment of word embeddings play an important role in knowledge transfer across languages, for improving machine translation and other multi-lingual applications. Current unsupervised approaches rely on similarities in…

A recent study by Ahmed and Devanbu reported that using a corpus of code written in multilingual datasets to fine-tune multilingual Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) achieves higher performance as opposed to using a corpus of code written…