Grammatical error correction (GEC) is important for improving written materials for low-resource languages like Zarma -- spoken by over 5 million people in West Africa. Yet it remains a challenging problem. This study compares rule-based methods, machine translation (MT) models, and large language models (LLMs) for GEC in Zarma. We evaluate each approach's effectiveness on our manually-built dataset of over 250,000 examples using synthetic and human-annotated data. Our experiments show that the MT-based approach using the M2M100 model outperforms others, achieving a detection rate of 95.82% and a suggestion accuracy of 78.90% in automatic evaluations, and scoring 3.0 out of 5.0 in logical/grammar error correction during MEs by native speakers. The rule-based method achieved perfect detection (100%) and high suggestion accuracy (96.27%) for spelling corrections but struggled with context-level errors. LLMs like MT5-small showed moderate performance with a detection rate of 90.62% and a suggestion accuracy of 57.15%. Our work highlights the potential of MT models to enhance GEC in low-resource languages, paving the way for more inclusive NLP tools.
The Transformer architecture has become widely adopted due to its demonstrated success, attributed to the attention mechanism at its core. Despite these successes, the attention mechanism of Transformers is associated with two well-known issues: rank-collapse and gradient vanishing. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis that it is inherently difficult to address both issues simultaneously in the conventional attention mechanism. To handle these issues, we introduce a novel class of attention mechanism, referred to as generalized probabilistic attention mechanism (GPAM), and its dual-attention implementation within the Transformer architecture. Unlike conventional attention mechanisms, GPAM allows for negative attention scores while preserving a fixed total sum. We provide theoretical evidence that the proposed dual-attention GPAM (daGPAM) effectively mitigates both the rank-collapse and gradient vanishing issues which are difficult to resolve simultaneously with the conventional attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we empirically validate this theoretical evidence, demonstrating the superiority of daGPAM compared to other alternative attention mechanisms that were proposed to address the same issues. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical benefits of GPAM in natural language processing tasks, such as language modeling and neural machine translation.
A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is designed to enhance clinician decision-making by combining system-generated recommendations with medical expertise. Given the high costs, intensive labor, and time-sensitive nature of medical treatments, there is a pressing need for efficient decision support, especially in complex emergency scenarios. In these scenarios, where information can be limited, an advanced CDSS framework that leverages AI (artificial intelligence) models to effectively reduce diagnostic uncertainty has utility. Such an AI-enabled CDSS framework with quantified uncertainty promises to be practical and beneficial in the demanding context of real-world medical care. In this study, we introduce the concept of Medical Entropy, quantifying uncertainties in patient outcomes predicted by neural machine translation based on the ICD-9 code of procedures. Our experimental results not only show strong correlations between procedure and diagnosis sequences based on the simple ICD-9 code but also demonstrate the promising capacity to model trends of uncertainties during hospitalizations through a data-driven approach.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across numerous NLP tasks but still encounter difficulties in machine translation. Traditional methods to improve translation have typically involved fine-tuning LLMs using parallel corpora. However, vanilla fine-tuning often leads to catastrophic forgetting of the instruction-following capabilities and alignment with human preferences, compromising their broad general abilities and introducing potential security risks. These abilities, which are developed using proprietary and unavailable training data, make existing continual instruction tuning methods ineffective. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel approach called RaDis (Rationale Distillation). RaDis harnesses the strong generative capabilities of LLMs to create rationales for training data, which are then "replayed" to prevent forgetting. These rationales encapsulate general knowledge and safety principles, acting as self-distillation targets to regulate the training process. By jointly training on both reference translations and self-generated rationales, the model can learn new translation skills while preserving its overall general abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enhances machine translation performance while maintaining the broader capabilities of LLMs across other tasks. This work presents a pathway for creating more versatile LLMs that excel in specialized tasks without compromising generality and safety.
Large language models (LLM) are increasingly strong contenders in machine translation. We study document-level translation, where some words cannot be translated without context from outside the sentence. We investigate the ability of prominent LLMs to utilize context by analyzing models' robustness to perturbed and randomized document context. We find that LLMs' improved document-translation performance is not always reflected in pronoun translation performance. We highlight the need for context-aware finetuning of LLMs with a focus on relevant parts of the context to improve their reliability for document-level translation.
This paper proposes the creation of a Swahili Question Answering (QA) benchmark dataset, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Swahili in natural language processing (NLP). Drawing from established benchmarks like SQuAD, GLUE, KenSwQuAD, and KLUE, the dataset will focus on providing high-quality, annotated question-answer pairs that capture the linguistic diversity and complexity of Swahili. The dataset is designed to support a variety of applications, including machine translation, information retrieval, and social services like healthcare chatbots. Ethical considerations, such as data privacy, bias mitigation, and inclusivity, are central to the dataset development. Additionally, the paper outlines future expansion plans to include domain-specific content, multimodal integration, and broader crowdsourcing efforts. The Swahili QA dataset aims to foster technological innovation in East Africa and provide an essential resource for NLP research and applications in low-resource languages.
Translating text that contains entity names is a challenging task, as cultural-related references can vary significantly across languages. These variations may also be caused by transcreation, an adaptation process that entails more than transliteration and word-for-word translation. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-cultural translation on two fronts: (i) we introduce XC-Translate, the first large-scale, manually-created benchmark for machine translation that focuses on text that contains potentially culturally-nuanced entity names, and (ii) we propose KG-MT, a novel end-to-end method to integrate information from a multilingual knowledge graph into a neural machine translation model by leveraging a dense retrieval mechanism. Our experiments and analyses show that current machine translation systems and large language models still struggle to translate texts containing entity names, whereas KG-MT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin, obtaining a 129% and 62% relative improvement compared to NLLB-200 and GPT-4, respectively.
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.
With the rapid advancement of machine translation research, evaluation toolkits have become essential for benchmarking system progress. Tools like COMET and SacreBLEU offer single quality score assessments that are effective for pairwise system comparisons. However, these tools provide limited insights for fine-grained system-level comparisons and the analysis of instance-level defects. To address these limitations, we introduce Translation Canvas, an explainable interface designed to pinpoint and analyze translation systems' performance: 1) Translation Canvas assists machine translation researchers in comprehending system-level model performance by identifying common errors (their frequency and severity) and analyzing relationships between different systems based on various evaluation metrics. 2) It supports fine-grained analysis by highlighting error spans with explanations and selectively displaying systems' predictions. According to human evaluation, Translation Canvas demonstrates superior performance over COMET and SacreBLEU packages under enjoyability and understandability criteria.
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.
This paper explores the challenges of detecting LGBTQIA+ hate speech of large language models across multiple languages, including English, Italian, Chinese and (code-switched) English-Tamil, examining the impact of machine translation and whether the nuances of hate speech are preserved across translation. We examine the hate speech detection ability of zero-shot and fine-tuned GPT. Our findings indicate that: (1) English has the highest performance and the code-switching scenario of English-Tamil being the lowest, (2) fine-tuning improves performance consistently across languages whilst translation yields mixed results. Through simple experimentation with original text and machine-translated text for hate speech detection along with a qualitative error analysis, this paper sheds light on the socio-cultural nuances and complexities of languages that may not be captured by automatic translation.
Machine translation (MT) has come a long way and is readily employed in production systems to serve millions of users daily. With the recent advances in generative AI, a new form of translation is becoming possible - video dubbing. This work motivates the importance of isochronic translation, especially in the context of automatic dubbing, and introduces `IsoChronoMeter' (ICM). ICM is a simple yet effective metric to measure isochrony of translations in a scalable and resource-efficient way without the need for gold data, based on state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) duration predictors. We motivate IsoChronoMeter and demonstrate its effectiveness. Using ICM we demonstrate the shortcomings of state-of-the-art translation systems and show the need for new methods. We release the code at this URL: \url{https://github.com/braskai/isochronometer}.
Collecting high-quality translations is crucial for the development and evaluation of machine translation systems. However, traditional human-only approaches are costly and slow. This study presents a comprehensive investigation of 11 approaches for acquiring translation data, including human-only, machineonly, and hybrid approaches. Our findings demonstrate that human-machine collaboration can match or even exceed the quality of human-only translations, while being more cost-efficient. Error analysis reveals the complementary strengths between human and machine contributions, highlighting the effectiveness of collaborative methods. Cost analysis further demonstrates the economic benefits of human-machine collaboration methods, with some approaches achieving top-tier quality at around 60% of the cost of traditional methods. We release a publicly available dataset containing nearly 18,000 segments of varying translation quality with corresponding human ratings to facilitate future research.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, primarily through in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, the LLM is provided with examples that represent a given task such that it learns to generate answers for test inputs. However, access to these in-context examples is not guaranteed especially for low-resource or massively multilingual tasks. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach to mine in-context examples for machine translation (MT), enabling unsupervised MT (UMT) across different languages. Our approach begins with word-level mining to acquire word translations that are then used to perform sentence-level mining. As the quality of mined parallel pairs may not be optimal due to noise or mistakes, we introduce a filtering criterion to select the optimal in-context examples from a pool of unsupervised parallel sentences. We evaluate our approach using two multilingual LLMs on 288 directions from the FLORES-200 dataset and analyze the impact of various linguistic features on performance. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our unsupervised approach in mining in-context examples for MT, leading to better or comparable translation performance as translation with regular in-context samples (extracted from human-annotated data), while also outperforming the other state-of-the-art UMT methods by an average of $7$ BLEU points.
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.
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in Machine Translation (MT) tasks. However, their MT abilities in the context of code-switching (the practice of mixing two or more languages in an utterance) remain under-explored. In this paper, we introduce Rule-Based Prompting, a novel prompting technique to generate code-mixed sentences. We measure and compare the code-mixed MT abilities of 3 popular multilingual LLMs: GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and Gemini Pro across five language pairs: English-{Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, French, Spanish} using $k$-shot prompting ($k\in\{0, 1, 10, 20\}$) and Rule-Based Prompting. Our findings suggest that though $k$-shot prompting often leads to the best results, Rule-Based prompting shows promise in generating unique code-mixed sentences that vary in their style of code-mixing. We also use $k$-shot prompting to gauge the code-mixed to English translation abilities of multilingual LLMs. For this purpose, we create a gold-standard code-mixed dataset spanning five language pairs: English-{Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, French, Spanish}. As a real-world application of our work, we create a code-mixed chatbot.
Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in translation without needing to be finetuned on additional parallel corpora. However, they still underperform for low-resource language pairs. Previous works have focused on mitigating this issue by leveraging relevant few-shot examples or external resources such as dictionaries or grammar books, making models heavily reliant on these nonparametric sources of information. In this paper, we propose a novel method named IntGrad MT that focuses on fully exploiting an LLM's inherent translation capability. IntGrad MT achieves this by constructing a chain of few-shot examples, each consisting of a source sentence and the model's own translation, that rise incrementally in difficulty. IntGrad MT employs two techniques: Sentence Interpolation, which generates a sequence of sentences that gradually change from an easy sentence to translate to a difficult one, and Gradual MT, which sequentially translates this chain using translations of earlier sentences as few-shot examples for the translation of subsequent ones. With this approach, we observe a substantial enhancement in the xCOMET scores of various LLMs for multiple languages, especially in low-resource languages such as Hindi(8.26), Swahili(7.10), Bengali(6.97) and Marathi(13.03). Our approach presents a practical way of enhancing LLMs' performance without extra training.
Translation is important for cross-language communication, and many efforts have been made to improve its accuracy. However, less investment is conducted in aligning translations with human preferences, such as translation tones or styles. In this paper, a new method is proposed to effectively generate large-scale multilingual parallel corpora with specific translation preferences using Large Language Models (LLMs). Meanwhile, an automatic pipeline is designed to distill human preferences into smaller Machine Translation (MT) models for efficiently and economically supporting large-scale calls in online services. Experiments indicate that the proposed method takes the lead in translation tasks with aligned human preferences by a large margin. Meanwhile, on popular public benchmarks like WMT and Flores, on which our models were not trained, the proposed method also shows a competitive performance compared to SOTA works.
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.