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Though the pre-trained contextualized language model (PrLM) has made a significant impact on NLP, training PrLMs in languages other than English can be impractical for two reasons: other languages often lack corpora sufficient for training…

Massively multilingual models for neural machine translation (NMT) are theoretically attractive, but often underperform bilingual models and deliver poor zero-shot translations. In this paper, we explore ways to improve them. We argue that…

Machine Translation models are trained to translate a variety of documents from one language into another. However, models specifically trained for a particular characteristics of the documents tend to perform better. Fine-tuning is a…

Machine translation systems with inadequate document understanding can make errors when translating dropped or neutral pronouns into languages with gendered pronouns (e.g., English). Predicting the underlying gender of these pronouns is…

Prior work shows that it is possible to expand pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) to new languages by learning a new set of embeddings, while keeping the transformer body frozen. Despite learning a small subset of parameters, this…

Many data sets (e.g., reviews, forums, news, etc.) exist parallelly in multiple languages. They all cover the same content, but the linguistic differences make it impossible to use traditional, bag-of-word-based topic models. Models have to…

Most pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models and training data for the downstream tasks are only available in English. Therefore, multilingual VL tasks are solved using cross-lingual transfer: fine-tune a multilingual pre-trained model or…

In cross-lingual transfer, NLP models over one or more source languages are applied to a low-resource target language. While most prior work has used a single source model or a few carefully selected models, here we consider a `massive'…

Aligning parallel sentences in multilingual corpora is essential to curating data for downstream applications such as Machine Translation. In this work, we present OneAligner, an alignment model specially designed for sentence retrieval…

We investigate the following question for machine translation (MT): can we develop a single universal MT model to serve as the common seed and obtain derivative and improved models on arbitrary language pairs? We propose mRASP, an approach…

Multilingual neural machine translation has shown the capability of directly translating between language pairs unseen in training, i.e. zero-shot translation. Despite being conceptually attractive, it often suffers from low output quality.…

In this paper, we propose a two-phase training approach where pre-trained large language models are continually pre-trained on parallel data and then supervised fine-tuned with a small amount of high-quality parallel data. To investigate…

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…

Machine Translation (MT) has been widely used for cross-lingual classification, either by translating the test set into English and running inference with a monolingual model (translate-test), or translating the training set into the target…

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems rely on large amounts of parallel data. This is a major challenge for low-resource languages. Building on recent work on unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we present an approach that combines…

Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries, which are expensive and impractical for low-resource languages. To disengage from these dependencies, researchers have explored training…

We introduce Trans-gram, a simple and computationally-efficient method to simultaneously learn and align wordembeddings for a variety of languages, using only monolingual data and a smaller set of sentence-aligned data. We use our new…

There has been increasing interest in building multilingual foundation models for NLP and speech research. This paper examines how to expand the speech translation capability of these models with restricted data. Whisper, a speech…

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is when a multilingual model is trained to perform a task in one language and then is applied to another language. Although the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer approach has achieved success in various…

Most languages lack sufficient data for large-scale monolingual pretraining, creating a "data wall." Multilingual pretraining helps but is limited by language imbalance and the "curse of multilinguality." An alternative is to translate…