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Languages are not created randomly but rather to communicate information. There is a strong association between languages and their underlying meanings, resulting in a sparse joint distribution that is heavily peaked according to their…
Multilingual Large Language Models considerably changed how technologies influence language. While previous technologies could mediate or assist humans, there is now a tendency to offload the task of writing itself to these technologies,…
The rapid adoption of generative AI (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has exposed critical limitations of cloud-centric deployments, including latency, cost, and privacy concerns. Meanwhile, Small Language Models (SLMs)…
While language identification is a fundamental speech and language processing task, for many languages and language families it remains a challenging task. For many low-resource and endangered languages this is in part due to resource…
A long standing goal of the data management community is to develop general, automated systems that ingest semi-structured documents and output queryable tables without human effort or domain specific customization. Given the sheer variety…
Low-resource machine translation remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), which often lack exposure to these languages during pretraining and have limited parallel data for fine-tuning. We propose a novel approach…
While dense retrieval models, which embed queries and documents into a shared low-dimensional space, have gained widespread popularity, they were shown to exhibit important theoretical limitations and considerably lag behind traditional…
Background: The growing demand for efficient and deployable language models has led to increased interest in Small Language Models (SLMs). However, existing research remains fragmented, lacking a unified lifecycle perspective. Objective:…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are tools that have become indispensable in development and programming. However, they suffer from hallucinations, especially when dealing with unknown knowledge. This is particularly the case when LLMs are to…
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world's languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…
Can large language models converse in languages virtually absent from their training data? We investigate this question through a case study on Tulu, a Dravidian language with over 2 million speakers but minimal digital presence. Rather…
Natural language serves as a common and straightforward signal for humans to interact seamlessly with machines. Recognizing the importance of this interface, the machine learning community is investing considerable effort in generating data…
This paper proposes a novel conceptualization of Large Language Models (LLMs) as externalized informational substrates that function analogously to DNA for human cultural dynamics. Rather than viewing LLMs as either autonomous intelligence…
Low-resource languages such as Sinhala are often overlooked by open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). In this research, we extend an existing multilingual LLM (Llama-3-8B) to better serve Sinhala. We enhance the LLM tokenizer with…
Domain-specific question answering in low-resource languages faces two key challenges: scarcity of annotated datasets and limited domain knowledge in general-purpose language models. In this work, we present a multi-stage finetuning…
Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to lack cultural representation and overall diversity in their generations, from expressing opinions to answering factual questions. To mitigate this problem, we propose multilingual prompting: a…
The increasing use of synthetic data generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) presents both opportunities and challenges in data-driven applications. While synthetic data provides a cost-effective, scalable alternative to real-world data…
Effective text generation and chat interfaces for low-resource languages (LRLs) remain a challenge for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to support. This is mainly due to the difficulty of curating high-quality instruction…
Open-source Large Language models (OsLLMs) propel the democratization of natural language research by giving the flexibility to augment or update model parameters for performance improvement. Nevertheless, like proprietary LLMs, Os-LLMs…