Historical and linguistic connections within the Sinosphere have led researchers to use Classical Chinese resources for cross-lingual transfer when processing historical documents from Korea and Japan. In this paper, we question the assumption of cross-lingual transferability from Classical Chinese to Hanja and Kanbun, the ancient written languages of Korea and Japan, respectively. Our experiments across machine translation, named entity recognition, and punctuation restoration tasks show minimal impact of Classical Chinese datasets on language model performance for ancient Korean documents written in Hanja, with performance differences within $\pm{}0.0068$ F1-score for sequence labeling tasks and up to $+0.84$ BLEU score for translation. These limitations persist consistently across various model sizes, architectures, and domain-specific datasets. Our analysis reveals that the benefits of Classical Chinese resources diminish rapidly as local language data increases for Hanja, while showing substantial improvements only in extremely low-resource scenarios for both Korean and Japanese historical documents. These mixed results emphasize the need for careful empirical validation rather than assuming benefits from indiscriminate cross-lingual transfer.
Due to the significant time and effort required for handcrafting translations, most manga never leave the domestic Japanese market. Automatic manga translation is a promising potential solution. However, it is a budding and underdeveloped field and presents complexities even greater than those found in standard translation due to the need to effectively incorporate visual elements into the translation process to resolve ambiguities. In this work, we investigate to what extent multimodal large language models (LLMs) can provide effective manga translation, thereby assisting manga authors and publishers in reaching wider audiences. Specifically, we propose a methodology that leverages the vision component of multimodal LLMs to improve translation quality and evaluate the impact of translation unit size, context length, and propose a token efficient approach for manga translation. Moreover, we introduce a new evaluation dataset -- the first parallel Japanese-Polish manga translation dataset -- as part of a benchmark to be used in future research. Finally, we contribute an open-source software suite, enabling others to benchmark LLMs for manga translation. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results for Japanese-English translation and set a new standard for Japanese-Polish.
Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages, enabling broad language scalability. However, byte-level tokenization results in sequences that are hard to interpret due to limited semantic information per byte. Local contextualization has proven effective in assigning initial semantics to tokens, improving sentence comprehension. Nevertheless, variations in encoding rules across languages necessitate an adaptive approach for effective contextualization. To this end, we propose Adaptive MultiScale-Headed Attention (Ada-MSHA), adaptively selecting and mixing attention heads, which are treated as contextualization experts. This enhances the flexibility of contextualization scales and improves the potential to discover a better strategy than previous methods. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing methods without extensive manual adjustment of hyper-parameters and surpasses subword-based models with fewer parameters in Ted-59 dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/ictnlp/MoCE.
We present MetaMetrics-MT, an innovative metric designed to evaluate machine translation (MT) tasks by aligning closely with human preferences through Bayesian optimization with Gaussian Processes. MetaMetrics-MT enhances existing MT metrics by optimizing their correlation with human judgments. Our experiments on the WMT24 metric shared task dataset demonstrate that MetaMetrics-MT outperforms all existing baselines, setting a new benchmark for state-of-the-art performance in the reference-based setting. Furthermore, it achieves comparable results to leading metrics in the reference-free setting, offering greater efficiency.
Methods based on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) are nowadays extensively used in support of vision-and-language tasks involving remote sensing data, such as cross-modal retrieval. The adaptation of CLIP to this specific domain has relied on model fine-tuning with the standard contrastive objective, using existing human-labeled image-caption datasets, or using synthetic data corresponding to image-caption pairs derived from other annotations over remote sensing images (e.g., object classes). The use of different pre-training mechanisms has received less attention, and only a few exceptions have considered multilingual inputs. This work proposes a novel vision-and-language model for the remote sensing domain, exploring the fine-tuning of a multilingual CLIP model and testing the use of a self-supervised method based on aligning local and global representations from individual input images, together with the standard CLIP objective. Model training relied on assembling pre-existing datasets of remote sensing images paired with English captions, followed by the use of automated machine translation into nine additional languages. We show that translated data is indeed helpful, e.g. improving performance also on English. Our resulting model, which we named Remote Sensing Multilingual CLIP (RS-M-CLIP), obtains state-of-the-art results in a variety of vision-and-language tasks, including cross-modal and multilingual image-text retrieval, or zero-shot image classification.
With the rapid development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, the accuracy and efficiency of machine translation have become hot topics of research. This paper proposes a novel Seq2Seq model aimed at improving translation quality while reducing the storage space required by the model. The model employs a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network (Bi-LSTM) as the encoder to capture the context information of the input sequence; the decoder incorporates an attention mechanism, enhancing the model's ability to focus on key information during the translation process. Compared to the current mainstream Transformer model, our model achieves superior performance on the WMT14 machine translation dataset while maintaining a smaller size. The study first introduces the design principles and innovative points of the model architecture, followed by a series of experiments to verify the effectiveness of the model. The experimental includes an assessment of the model's performance on different language pairs, as well as comparative analysis with traditional Seq2Seq models. The results show that while maintaining translation accuracy, our model significantly reduces the storage requirements, which is of great significance for translation applications in resource-constrained scenarios. our code are available at https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/arxiv_papers/miniformer. Thanks for the support provided by MindSpore Community.
Recent advances in automatic quality estimation for machine translation have exclusively focused on written language, leaving the speech modality underexplored. In this work, we formulate the task of quality estimation for speech translation (SpeechQE), construct a benchmark, and evaluate a family of systems based on cascaded and end-to-end architectures. In this process, we introduce a novel end-to-end system leveraging pre-trained text LLM. Results suggest that end-to-end approaches are better suited to estimating the quality of direct speech translation than using quality estimation systems designed for text in cascaded systems. More broadly, we argue that quality estimation of speech translation needs to be studied as a separate problem from that of text, and release our data and models to guide further research in this space.
Large language models (LLMs) have excelled in various NLP tasks, including machine translation (MT), yet most studies focus on sentence-level translation. This work investigates the inherent capability of instruction-tuned LLMs for document-level translation (docMT). Unlike prior approaches that require specialized techniques, we evaluate LLMs by directly prompting them to translate entire documents in a single pass. Our results show that this method improves translation quality compared to translating sentences separately, even without document-level fine-tuning. However, this advantage is not reflected in BLEU scores, which often favor sentence-based translations. We propose using the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm for evaluation, where GPT-4 is used to assess document coherence, accuracy, and fluency in a more nuanced way than n-gram-based metrics. Overall, our work demonstrates that instruction-tuned LLMs can effectively leverage document context for translation. However, we caution against using BLEU scores for evaluating docMT, as they often provide misleading outcomes, failing to capture the quality of document-level translation. Code and the outputs from GPT4-as-a-judge are available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/BLEUless_DocMT
This study introduces SLLMBO, an innovative framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) for hyperparameter optimization (HPO), incorporating dynamic search space adaptability, enhanced parameter space exploitation, and a novel LLM-tree-structured parzen estimator (LLM-TPE) sampler. By addressing limitations in recent fully LLM-based methods and traditional bayesian optimization (BO), SLLMBO achieves more robust optimization. This comprehensive benchmarking evaluates multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o, Claude-Sonnet-3.5, and Gemini-1.5-Flash, extending prior work and establishing SLLMBO as the first framework to benchmark a diverse set of LLMs for HPO. By integrating LLMs' established strengths in parameter initialization with the exploitation abilities demonstrated in this study, alongside TPE's exploration capabilities, the LLM-TPE sampler achieves a balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off, reduces API costs, and mitigates premature early stoppings for more effective parameter searches. Across 14 tabular tasks in classification and regression, the LLM-TPE sampler outperformed fully LLM-based methods and achieved superior results over BO methods in 9 tasks. Testing early stopping in budget-constrained scenarios demonstrated competitive performance, indicating that LLM-based methods generally benefit from extended iterations for optimal results. This work lays the foundation for future research exploring open-source LLMs, reproducibility of LLM results in HPO, and benchmarking SLLMBO on complex datasets, such as image classification, segmentation, and machine translation.
Recent research has focused on literary machine translation (MT) as a new challenge in MT. However, the evaluation of literary MT remains an open problem. We contribute to this ongoing discussion by introducing LITEVAL-CORPUS, a paragraph-level parallel corpus comprising multiple verified human translations and outputs from 9 MT systems, which totals over 2k paragraphs and includes 13k annotated sentences across four language pairs, costing 4.5k Euro. This corpus enables us to (i) examine the consistency and adequacy of multiple annotation schemes, (ii) compare evaluations by students and professionals, and (iii) assess the effectiveness of LLM-based metrics. We find that Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), as the de facto standard in non-literary human MT evaluation, is inadequate for literary translation: While Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) with students and Scalar Quality Metric (SQM) with professional translators prefer human translations at rates of ~82% and ~94%, respectively, MQM with student annotators prefers human professional translations over the translations of the best-performing LLMs in only ~42% of cases. While automatic metrics generally show a moderate correlation with human MQM and SQM, they struggle to accurately identify human translations, with rates of at most ~20%. Our overall evaluation indicates that human professional translations consistently outperform LLM translations, where even the most recent LLMs tend to produce more literal and less diverse translations compared to human translations. However, newer LLMs such as GPT-4o perform substantially better than older ones.
Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages are not considered high resource and lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not without resources, however, and bilingual dictionaries and grammar books are available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can begin to use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world's languages. In this paper, we demonstrate incorporating grammar books in the prompt of GPT-4 to improve machine translation and evaluate the performance on 16 topologically diverse low-resource languages, using a combination of reference material to show that the machine translation performance of LLMs can be improved using this method.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced code generation from natural language prompts. The HumanEval Benchmark, developed by OpenAI, remains the most widely used code generation benchmark. However, this and other Code LLM benchmarks face critical limitations, particularly in task diversity, test coverage, and linguistic scope. Current evaluations primarily focus on English-to-Python conversion tasks with limited test cases, potentially overestimating model performance. While recent works have addressed test coverage and programming language (PL) diversity, code generation from low-resource language prompts remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce mHumanEval, an extended benchmark supporting prompts in over 200 natural languages. We employ established machine translation methods to compile the benchmark, coupled with a quality assurance process. Furthermore, we provide expert human translations for 15 diverse natural languages (NLs). We conclude by analyzing the multilingual code generation capabilities of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Code LLMs, offering insights into the current landscape of cross-lingual code generation.
Machine translation (MT) in the medical domain plays a pivotal role in enhancing healthcare quality and disseminating medical knowledge. Despite advancements in English-Thai MT technology, common MT approaches often underperform in the medical field due to their inability to precisely translate medical terminologies. Our research prioritizes not merely improving translation accuracy but also maintaining medical terminology in English within the translated text through code-switched (CS) translation. We developed a method to produce CS medical translation data, fine-tuned a CS translation model with this data, and evaluated its performance against strong baselines, such as Google Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and GPT-3.5/GPT-4. Our model demonstrated competitive performance in automatic metrics and was highly favored in human preference evaluations. Our evaluation result also shows that medical professionals significantly prefer CS translations that maintain critical English terms accurately, even if it slightly compromises fluency. Our code and test set are publicly available https://github.com/preceptorai-org/NLLB_CS_EM_NLP2024.
This paper describes NLIP Lab's multilingual machine translation system for the WAT24 shared task on multilingual Indic MT task for 22 scheduled languages belonging to 4 language families. We explore pre-training for Indic languages using alignment agreement objectives. We utilize bi-lingual dictionaries to substitute words from source sentences. Furthermore, we fine-tuned language direction-specific multilingual translation models using small and high-quality seed data. Our primary submission is a 243M parameters multilingual translation model covering 22 Indic languages. In the IN22-Gen benchmark, we achieved an average chrF++ score of 46.80 and 18.19 BLEU score for the En-Indic direction. In the Indic-En direction, we achieved an average chrF++ score of 56.34 and 30.82 BLEU score. In the In22-Conv benchmark, we achieved an average chrF++ score of 43.43 and BLEU score of 16.58 in the En-Indic direction, and in the Indic-En direction, we achieved an average of 52.44 and 29.77 for chrF++ and BLEU respectively. Our model\footnote{Our code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/maharajbrahma/WAT2024-MultiIndicMT}} is competitive with IndicTransv1 (474M parameter model).
The sarcasm detection task in natural language processing tries to classify whether an utterance is sarcastic or not. It is related to sentiment analysis since it often inverts surface sentiment. Because sarcastic sentences are highly dependent on context, and they are often accompanied by various non-verbal cues, the task is challenging. Most of related work focuses on high-resourced languages like English. To build a sarcasm detection dataset for a less-resourced language, such as Slovenian, we leverage two modern techniques: a machine translation specific medium-size transformer model, and a very large generative language model. We explore the viability of translated datasets and how the size of a pretrained transformer affects its ability to detect sarcasm. We train ensembles of detection models and evaluate models' performance. The results show that larger models generally outperform smaller ones and that ensembling can slightly improve sarcasm detection performance. Our best ensemble approach achieves an $\text{F}_1$-score of 0.765 which is close to annotators' agreement in the source language.
Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) aims to generate natural textual descriptions for input audio signals. Recent progress in audio pre-trained models and large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced audio understanding and textual reasoning capabilities, making improvements in AAC possible. In this paper, we propose SLAM-AAC to further enhance AAC with paraphrasing augmentation and CLAP-Refine through LLMs. Our approach uses the self-supervised EAT model to extract fine-grained audio representations, which are then aligned with textual embeddings via lightweight linear layers. The caption generation LLM is efficiently fine-tuned using the LoRA adapter. Drawing inspiration from the back-translation method in machine translation, we implement paraphrasing augmentation to expand the Clotho dataset during pre-training. This strategy helps alleviate the limitation of scarce audio-text pairs and generates more diverse captions from a small set of audio clips. During inference, we introduce the plug-and-play CLAP-Refine strategy to fully exploit multiple decoding outputs, akin to the n-best rescoring strategy in speech recognition. Using the CLAP model for audio-text similarity calculation, we could select the textual descriptions generated by multiple searching beams that best match the input audio. Experimental results show that SLAM-AAC achieves state-of-the-art performance on Clotho V2 and AudioCaps, surpassing previous mainstream models.
The automatic assessment of translation quality has recently become crucial across several stages of the translation pipeline, from data curation to training and decoding. Although quality estimation (QE) metrics have been optimized to align with human judgments, no attention has been given to these metrics' potential biases, particularly in reinforcing visibility and usability for some demographic groups over others. This study is the first to investigate gender bias in QE metrics and its downstream impact on machine translation (MT). Focusing on out-of-English translations into languages with grammatical gender, we ask: Do contemporary QE metrics exhibit gender bias? Can the use of contextual information mitigate this bias? How does QE influence gender bias in MT outputs? Experiments with state-of-the-art QE metrics across multiple domains, datasets, and languages reveal significant bias. Masculine-inflected translations score higher than feminine-inflected ones, and gender-neutral translations are penalized. Moreover, context-aware QE metrics reduce errors for masculine-inflected references but fail to address feminine referents, exacerbating gender disparities. Additionally, QE metrics can perpetuate gender bias in MT systems when used in quality-aware decoding. Our findings underscore the need to address gender bias in QE metrics to ensure equitable and unbiased MT systems.
This paper introduces a centralized, open-source dataset repository designed to advance NLP and NMT for Assamese, a low-resource language. The repository, available at GitHub, supports various tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and machine translation by providing both pre-training and fine-tuning corpora. We review existing datasets, highlighting the need for standardized resources in Assamese NLP, and discuss potential applications in AI-driven research, such as LLMs, OCR, and chatbots. While promising, challenges like data scarcity and linguistic diversity remain. The repository aims to foster collaboration and innovation, promoting Assamese language research in the digital age.
Vocabulary adaptation, which integrates new vocabulary into pre-trained language models (LMs), enables expansion to new languages and mitigates token over-fragmentation. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on heuristic or external embeddings. We propose VocADT, a novel method for vocabulary adaptation using adapter modules that are trained to learn the optimal linear combination of existing embeddings while keeping the model's weights fixed. VocADT offers a flexible and scalable solution without requiring external resources or language constraints. Across 11 languages-with various scripts, resource availability, and fragmentation-we demonstrate that VocADT outperforms the original Mistral model and other baselines across various multilingual tasks. We find that Latin-script languages and highly fragmented languages benefit the most from vocabulary adaptation. We further fine-tune the adapted model on the generative task of machine translation and find that vocabulary adaptation is still beneficial after fine-tuning and that VocADT is the most effective method.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved reasonable quality improvements in machine translation (MT). However, most current research on MT-LLMs still faces significant challenges in maintaining translation consistency and accuracy when processing entire documents. In this paper, we introduce DelTA, a Document-levEL Translation Agent designed to overcome these limitations. DelTA features a multi-level memory structure that stores information across various granularities and spans, including Proper Noun Records, Bilingual Summary, Long-Term Memory, and Short-Term Memory, which are continuously retrieved and updated by auxiliary LLM-based components. Experimental results indicate that DelTA significantly outperforms strong baselines in terms of translation consistency and quality across four open/closed-source LLMs and two representative document translation datasets, achieving an increase in consistency scores by up to 4.58 percentage points and in COMET scores by up to 3.16 points on average. DelTA employs a sentence-by-sentence translation strategy, ensuring no sentence omissions and offering a memory-efficient solution compared to the mainstream method. Furthermore, DelTA improves pronoun translation accuracy, and the summary component of the agent also shows promise as a tool for query-based summarization tasks. We release our code and data at https://github.com/YutongWang1216/DocMTAgent.