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Large multilingual language models typically share their parameters across all languages, which enables cross-lingual task transfer, but learning can also be hindered when training updates from different languages are in conflict. In this…

Multilingual proficiency presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). English-centric models are usually suboptimal in other languages, particularly those that are linguistically distant from English. This performance…

Pre-trained vision and language models such as CLIP have witnessed remarkable success in connecting images and texts with a primary focus on English texts. Despite recent efforts to extend CLIP to support other languages, disparities in…

Existing work in multilingual pretraining has demonstrated the potential of cross-lingual transferability by training a unified Transformer encoder for multiple languages. However, much of this work only relies on the shared vocabulary and…

Code-Switching (CS) is a common linguistic phenomenon in multilingual communities that consists of switching between languages while speaking. This paper presents our investigations on end-to-end speech recognition for Mandarin-English CS…

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…

Using supporting backchannel (BC) cues can make human-computer interaction more social. BCs provide a feedback from the listener to the speaker indicating to the speaker that he is still listened to. BCs can be expressed in different ways,…

Sentiment analysis (SA) systems are widely deployed in many of the world's languages, and there is well-documented evidence of demographic bias in these systems. In languages beyond English, scarcer training data is often supplemented with…

This paper introduces a set of English translations for a 123-hour subset of the CallHome Mandarin Chinese data and the HKUST Mandarin Telephone Speech data for the task of speech translation. Paired source-language speech and…

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…

We study the problem of multilingual masked language modeling, i.e. the training of a single model on concatenated text from multiple languages, and present a detailed study of several factors that influence why these models are so…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite English-dominated pre-training, attributed to cross-lingual mechanisms during pre-training. Existing methods for enhancing cross-lingual transfer remain…

Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. However, it remains unclear if such an inductive bias would also improve language…

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficiency of generative pretraining for English natural language understanding. In this work, we extend this approach to multiple languages and show the effectiveness of cross-lingual pretraining. We…

Aligning language models (LMs) based on human-annotated preference data is a crucial step in obtaining practical and performant LM-based systems. However, multilingual human preference data are difficult to obtain at scale, making it…

Recent research suggests that the feed-forward module within Transformers can be viewed as a collection of key-value memories, where the keys learn to capture specific patterns from the input based on the training examples. The values then…

Multilingual pretraining and fine-tuning have remarkably succeeded in various natural language processing tasks. Transferring representations from one language to another is especially crucial for cross-lingual learning. One can expect…

We introduce a novel method for multilingual transfer that utilizes deep contextual embeddings, pretrained in an unsupervised fashion. While contextual embeddings have been shown to yield richer representations of meaning compared to their…

Machine Translation (MT) evaluation has gone beyond metrics, towards more specific linguistic phenomena. Regarding English-Chinese language pairs, passive sentences are constructed and distributed differently due to language variation, thus…

Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in…