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Pretrained masked language models (MLMs) require finetuning for most NLP tasks. Instead, we evaluate MLMs out of the box via their pseudo-log-likelihood scores (PLLs), which are computed by masking tokens one by one. We show that PLLs…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

We present a joint Speech and Language Model (SLM), a multitask, multilingual, and dual-modal model that takes advantage of pretrained foundational speech and language models. SLM freezes the pretrained foundation models to maximally…

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…

A prominent achievement of natural language processing (NLP) is its ability to understand and generate meaningful human language. This capability relies on complex feedforward transformer block architectures pre-trained on large language…

Despite the impressive performance recently achieved by automatic speech recognition (ASR), we observe two primary challenges that hinder its broader applications: (1) The difficulty of introducing scalability into the model to support more…

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are known to more frequently generate non-faithful output in resource-constrained languages (Guerreiro et al., 2023 - arXiv:2303.16104), potentially because these typologically diverse languages are…

Transformer-based language models, such as BERT and its variants, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in several downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks on generic benchmark datasets (e.g., GLUE, SQUAD, RACE). However,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success with their billion-level parameters, yet they incur high inference overheads. The emergence of activation sparsity in LLMs provides a natural approach to reduce this cost by…

Language modeling (LM) for automatic speech recognition (ASR) does not usually incorporate utterance level contextual information. For some domains like voice assistants, however, additional context, such as the time at which an utterance…

Speech-aware LLMs (SLLMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art ASR performance; however, they still fail to accurately transcribe bias words that appear rarely or never in the training data. Contextual biasing mechanisms are commonly…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in a multitude of NLP tasks. However, the efficacy of such models to languages other than English is often limited. Prior works have shown that encoder-only models such as…

LLMs are predominantly trained on English data, which leads to a significant drop in performance on low-resource languages. Understanding how LLMs handle these languages is crucial for improving their effectiveness. This study focuses on…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a cost-effective way to incorporate information from a specific dataset. However, when a problem requires incorporating information from multiple datasets - as in…

Pre-trained language models in the past years have shown exponential growth in model parameters and compute time. ELECTRA is a novel approach for improving the compute efficiency of pre-trained language models (e.g. BERT) based on masked…

More recently, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was proposed and has achieved impressive success on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering and language understanding, due mainly…

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in natural language processing (NLP), particularly their remarkable performance in various downstream tasks in resource-rich languages. Recent studies have highlighted the…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models demonstrate outstanding performance on high-resource languages but face significant challenges when applied to low-resource languages due to limited training data and insufficient cross-lingual…

What can pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART contribute to translating low-resource languages? We conduct a thorough empirical experiment in 10 languages to ascertain this, considering five factors: (1) the…

This paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to improve transcription accuracy. The increasing sophistication of LLMs, with their in-context learning capabilities and…