Related papers: Multilingual MFA: Forced Alignment on Low-Resource…
Instead of pretraining multilingual language models from scratch, a more efficient method is to adapt existing pretrained language models (PLMs) to new languages via vocabulary extension and continued pretraining. However, this method…
Realignment is a promising strategy to improve cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models. However, empirical results are mixed and often unreliable, particularly for typologically distant or low-resource languages (LRLs)…
We report on adaptation of multilingual end-to-end speech recognition models trained on as many as 100 languages. Our findings shed light on the relative importance of similarity between the target and pretraining languages along the…
Pretrained multilingual models enable zero-shot learning even for unseen languages, and that performance can be further improved via adaptation prior to finetuning. However, it is unclear how the number of pretraining languages influences a…
Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems mostly benefit low resource languages but suffer degradation in performance across several languages relative to their monolingual counterparts. Limited studies have focused on…
We present Bournemouth Forced Aligner (BFA), a system that combines a Contextless Universal Phoneme Encoder (CUPE) with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC)based decoder. BFA introduces explicit modelling of inter-phoneme gaps and…
Foundational large language models (LLMs) can be instruction-tuned to perform open-domain question answering, facilitating applications like chat assistants. While such efforts are often carried out in a single language, we empirically…
Multilingual large language models (MLLMs), trained on multilingual balanced data, demonstrate better zero-shot learning performance in non-English languages compared to large language models trained on English-dominant data. However, the…
Existing large language models show disparate capability across different languages, due to the imbalance in the training data. Their performances on English tasks are often stronger than on tasks of other languages. In this paper, we…
Prior work on multilingual question answering has mostly focused on using large multilingual pre-trained language models (LM) to perform zero-shot language-wise learning: train a QA model on English and test on other languages. In this…
Pretrained language models are promising particularly for low-resource languages as they only require unlabelled data. However, training existing models requires huge amounts of compute, while pretrained cross-lingual models often…
Pretrained multilingual contextual representations have shown great success, but due to the limits of their pretraining data, their benefits do not apply equally to all language varieties. This presents a challenge for language varieties…
Unsupervised cross-lingual pretraining has achieved strong results in neural machine translation (NMT), by drastically reducing the need for large parallel data. Most approaches adapt masked-language modeling (MLM) to sequence-to-sequence…
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…
Recent models such as XLS-R and Whisper have made multilingual speech technologies more accessible by pre-training on audio from around 100 spoken languages each. However, there are thousands of spoken languages worldwide, and adapting to…
The "massively-multilingual" training of multilingual models is known to limit their utility in any one language, and they perform particularly poorly on low-resource languages. However, there is evidence that low-resource languages can…
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance of many vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval, visual entailment, and visual reasoning. The pre-training mostly utilizes lexical databases and image queries in…
The language ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is often unbalanced towards English because of the imbalance in the distribution of the pre-training data. This disparity is demanded in further fine-tuning and affecting the…
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) for low-resource languages (LRL) can be enhanced by the presence of related high-resource languages (HRL), but the relatedness of HRL usually relies on predefined linguistic assumptions about…
In this work we approach the task of learning multilingual word representations in an offline manner by fitting a generative latent variable model to a multilingual dictionary. We model equivalent words in different languages as different…