Related papers: Pretraining Strategies using Monolingual and Paral…
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…
Parallel corpora play an important role in training machine translation (MT) models, particularly for low-resource languages where high-quality bilingual data is scarce. This review provides a comprehensive overview of available parallel…
Machine translation (MT) involving Indigenous languages, including those possibly endangered, is challenging due to lack of sufficient parallel data. We describe an approach exploiting bilingual and multilingual pretrained MT models in a…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community. Establishing best practices in pretraining has, therefore, become a major focus of NLP research, especially since…
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)…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has made great advancements in recent years with major breakthroughs that have established new benchmarks. However, these advances have mainly benefited a certain group of languages commonly…
The combination of multilingual pre-trained representations and cross-lingual transfer learning is one of the most effective methods for building functional NLP systems for low-resource languages. However, for extremely low-resource…
Recently proposed data collection frameworks for endangered language documentation aim not only to collect speech in the language of interest, but also to collect translations into a high-resource language that will render the collected…
Low-resource African languages have not fully benefited from the progress in neural machine translation because of a lack of data. Motivated by this challenge we compare zero-shot learning, transfer learning and multilingual learning on…
Morphological modeling in neural machine translation (NMT) is a promising approach to achieving open-vocabulary machine translation for morphologically-rich languages. However, existing methods such as sub-word tokenization and…
Multilingual semantic parsing is a cost-effective method that allows a single model to understand different languages. However, researchers face a great imbalance of availability of training data, with English being resource rich, and other…
Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are at the forefront of advances in Natural Language Processing. One widespread use case of PLMs is "prompting" - or in-context learning - where a user provides a description of a task and some…
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…
This paper examines the problem of adapting neural machine translation systems to new, low-resourced languages (LRLs) as effectively and rapidly as possible. We propose methods based on starting with massively multilingual "seed models",…
We present a simple method to improve neural translation of a low-resource language pair using parallel data from a related, also low-resource, language pair. The method is based on the transfer method of Zoph et al., but whereas their…
In recent years, neural models learned through self-supervised pretraining on large scale multilingual text or speech data have exhibited promising results for underresourced languages, especially when a relatively large amount of data from…
Multilingual language models are widely used to extend NLP systems to low-resource languages. However, concrete evidence for the effects of multilinguality on language modeling performance in individual languages remains scarce. Here, we…
Despite impressive empirical successes of neural machine translation (NMT) on standard benchmarks, limited parallel data impedes the application of NMT models to many language pairs. Data augmentation methods such as back-translation make…
Despite the widespread multilingual deployment of large language models, post-training pipelines remain predominantly English-centric, contributing to performance disparities across languages. We present a systematic, controlled study of…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable performance in high-resource languages. However, their effectiveness diminishes significantly in the contexts of low-resource languages. Current multilingual enhancement methods…