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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…

Script diversity presents a challenge to Multilingual Language Models (MLLM) by reducing lexical overlap among closely related languages. Therefore, transliterating closely related languages that use different writing scripts to a common…

The capacity and effectiveness of pre-trained multilingual models (MLMs) for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is well established. However, phenomena of positive or negative transfer, and the effect of language choice still need to be fully…

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities. While most of the existing LLMs have very unbalanced performance across different languages, multilingual alignment based on translation parallel data is an…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well…

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…

Most Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to date are trained predominantly on English data, which makes them struggle to understand non-English input and fail to generate output in the desired target language. Existing efforts mitigate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are acquiring a wider range of capabilities, including understanding and responding in multiple languages. While they undergo safety training to prevent them from answering illegal questions, imbalances in…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate unprecedented capabilities and define the state of the art for almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks and also for essentially all Language Technology (LT) applications. LLMs can only be…

Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models' multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood. We ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be trained on a second language.…

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on extensive text corpora, which are often unevenly distributed across languages. This imbalance results in LLMs performing significantly better on high-resource languages like English,…

English pretrained language models, which make up the backbone of many modern NLP systems, require huge amounts of unlabeled training data. These models are generally presented as being trained only on English text but have been found to…

Recent advancements in NLP have given us models like mBERT and XLMR that can serve over 100 languages. The languages that these models are evaluated on, however, are very few in number, and it is unlikely that evaluation datasets will cover…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional natural language understanding abilities and have excelled in a variety of natural language processing (NLP)tasks in recent years. Despite the fact that most LLMs are trained…

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain heavily centered on English, with limited performance in low-resource languages. Existing adaptation approaches, such as continual pre-training, demand significant computational resources. In the case of…

Recently, mT5 - a massively multilingual version of T5 - leveraged a unified text-to-text format to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of multilingual NLP tasks. In this paper, we investigate the impact of incorporating…

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks make use of massively pre-trained language models, which are computationally expensive. However, access to high computational resources added to the issue of data scarcity of African languages…

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) are jointly trained on data from many different languages such that representation of individual languages can benefit from other languages' data. Impressive performance on zero-shot cross-lingual…

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), one traditionally considers a single task (e.g. part-of-speech tagging) for a single language (e.g. English) at a time. However, recent work has shown that it can be beneficial to take advantage of…