Language Processing systems such as Part-of-speech tagging, Named entity recognition, Machine translation, Speech recognition, and Language modeling (LM) are well-studied in high-resource languages. Nevertheless, research on these systems for several low-resource languages, including Bodo, Mizo, Nagamese, and others, is either yet to commence or is in its nascent stages. Language model plays a vital role in the downstream tasks of modern NLP. Extensive studies are carried out on LMs for high-resource languages. Nevertheless, languages such as Bodo, Rabha, and Mising continue to lack coverage. In this study, we first present BodoBERT, a language model for the Bodo language. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first such effort to develop a language model for Bodo. Secondly, we present an ensemble DL-based POS tagging model for Bodo. The POS tagging model is based on combinations of BiLSTM with CRF and stacked embedding of BodoBERT with BytePairEmbeddings. We cover several language models in the experiment to see how well they work in POS tagging tasks. The best-performing model achieves an F1 score of 0.8041. A comparative experiment was also conducted on Assamese POS taggers, considering that the language is spoken in the same region as Bodo.
Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding is shown to be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding for a wide range of text generation tasks. However, MBR requires a huge amount of time for inference to compute the MBR objective, which makes the method infeasible in many situations where response time is critical. Confidence-based pruning (CBP) (Cheng and Vlachos, 2023) has recently been proposed to reduce the inference time in machine translation tasks. Although it is shown to significantly reduce the amount of computation, it requires hyperparameter tuning using a development set to be effective. To this end, we propose Approximate Minimum Bayes-Risk (AMBR) decoding, a hyperparameter-free method to run MBR decoding approximately. AMBR is derived from the observation that the problem of computing the sample-based MBR objective is the medoid identification problem. AMBR uses the Correlated Sequential Halving (CSH) algorithm (Baharav and Tse, 2019), the best approximation algorithm to date for the medoid identification problem, to compute the sample-based MBR objective. We evaluate AMBR on machine translation, text summarization, and image captioning tasks. The results show that AMBR achieves on par with CBP, with CBP selecting hyperparameters through an Oracle for each given computation budget.
We conduct a large-scale fine-grained comparative analysis of machine translations (MT) against human translations (HT) through the lens of morphosyntactic divergence. Across three language pairs and two types of divergence defined as the structural difference between the source and the target, MT is consistently more conservative than HT, with less morphosyntactic diversity, more convergent patterns, and more one-to-one alignments. Through analysis on different decoding algorithms, we attribute this discrepancy to the use of beam search that biases MT towards more convergent patterns. This bias is most amplified when the convergent pattern appears around 50% of the time in training data. Lastly, we show that for a majority of morphosyntactic divergences, their presence in HT is correlated with decreased MT performance, presenting a greater challenge for MT systems.
Automatic machine translation metrics typically rely on human translations to determine the quality of system translations. Common wisdom in the field dictates that the human references should be of very high quality. However, there are no cost-benefit analyses that could be used to guide practitioners who plan to collect references for machine translation evaluation. We find that higher-quality references lead to better metric correlations with humans at the segment-level. Having up to 7 references per segment and taking their average (or maximum) helps all metrics. Interestingly, the references from vendors of different qualities can be mixed together and improve metric success. Higher quality references, however, cost more to create and we frame this as an optimization problem: given a specific budget, what references should be collected to maximize metric success. These findings can be used by evaluators of shared tasks when references need to be created under a certain budget.
Machine translation systems have been widely adopted in our daily life, making life easier and more convenient. Unfortunately, erroneous translations may result in severe consequences, such as financial losses. This requires to improve the accuracy and the reliability of machine translation systems. However, it is challenging to test machine translation systems because of the complexity and intractability of the underlying neural models. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel metamorphic testing approach by syntactic tree pruning (STP) to validate machine translation systems. Our key insight is that a pruned sentence should have similar crucial semantics compared with the original sentence. Specifically, STP (1) proposes a core semantics-preserving pruning strategy by basic sentence structure and dependency relations on the level of syntactic tree representation; (2) generates source sentence pairs based on the metamorphic relation; (3) reports suspicious issues whose translations break the consistency property by a bag-of-words model. We further evaluate STP on two state-of-the-art machine translation systems (i.e., Google Translate and Bing Microsoft Translator) with 1,200 source sentences as inputs. The results show that STP can accurately find 5,073 unique erroneous translations in Google Translate and 5,100 unique erroneous translations in Bing Microsoft Translator (400% more than state-of-the-art techniques), with 64.5% and 65.4% precision, respectively. The reported erroneous translations vary in types and more than 90% of them cannot be found by state-of-the-art techniques. There are 9,393 erroneous translations unique to STP, which is 711.9% more than state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, STP is quite effective to detect translation errors for the original sentences with a recall reaching 74.0%, improving state-of-the-art techniques by 55.1% on average.
We introduce LogicAsker, a novel approach for evaluating and enhancing the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Despite LLMs' prowess in tasks like writing assistance, code generation, and machine translation, assessing their ability to reason has been challenging. Traditional evaluations often prioritize accuracy on downstream tasks over direct assessments of reasoning processes. LogicAsker addresses this gap by employing a set of atomic reasoning skills grounded in propositional and predicate logic to systematically examine and improve the reasoning prowess of LLMs. Our methodology reveals significant gaps in LLMs' learning of logical rules, with identified reasoning failures ranging from 29\% to 90\% across different models. Moreover, we leverage these findings to construct targeted demonstration examples and fine-tune data, notably enhancing logical reasoning in models like GPT-4o by up to 5\%. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to utilize test case outcomes to effectively refine LLMs' formal reasoning capabilities. We make our code, data, and results publicly available (https://github.com/yxwan123/LogicAsker) to facilitate further research and replication of our findings.
Natural Medicinal Materials (NMMs) have a long history of global clinical applications and a wealth of records and knowledge. Although NMMs are a major source for drug discovery and clinical application, the utilization and sharing of NMM knowledge face crucial challenges, including the standardized description of critical information, efficient curation and acquisition, and language barriers. To address these, we developed ShennongAlpha, an AI-driven sharing and collaboration platform for intelligent knowledge curation, acquisition, and translation. For standardized knowledge curation, the platform introduced a Systematic Nomenclature to enable accurate differentiation and identification of NMMs. More than fourteen thousand Chinese NMMs have been curated into the platform along with their knowledge. Furthermore, the platform pioneered chat-based knowledge acquisition, standardized machine translation, and collaborative knowledge updating. Together, our study represents the first major advance in leveraging AI to empower NMM knowledge sharing, which not only marks a novel application of AI for Science, but also will significantly benefit the global biomedical, pharmaceutical, physician, and patient communities.
Although the Transformer is currently the best-performing architecture in the homogeneous configuration (self-attention only) in Neural Machine Translation, many State-of-the-Art models in Natural Language Processing are made of a combination of different Deep Learning approaches. However, these models often focus on combining a couple of techniques only and it is unclear why some methods are chosen over others. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of integrating an increasing number of heterogeneous methods. Based on a simple combination strategy and performance-driven synergy criteria, we designed the Multi-Encoder Transformer, which consists of up to five diverse encoders. Results showcased that our approach can improve the quality of the translation across a variety of languages and dataset sizes and it is particularly effective in low-resource languages where we observed a maximum increase of 7.16 BLEU compared to the single-encoder model.
Despite the widespread use of the Persian language by millions globally, limited efforts have been made in natural language processing for this language. The use of large language models as effective tools in various natural language processing tasks typically requires extensive textual data and robust hardware resources. Consequently, the scarcity of Persian textual data and the unavailability of powerful hardware resources have hindered the development of large language models for Persian. This paper introduces the first large Persian language model, named PersianLLaMA, trained on a collection of Persian texts and datasets. This foundational model comes in two versions, with 7 and 13 billion parameters, trained on formal and colloquial Persian texts using two different approaches. PersianLLaMA has been evaluated for natural language generation tasks based on the latest evaluation methods, namely using larger language models, and for natural language understanding tasks based on automated machine metrics. The results indicate that PersianLLaMA significantly outperforms its competitors in both understanding and generating Persian text. PersianLLaMA marks an important step in the development of Persian natural language processing and can be a valuable resource for the Persian-speaking community. This large language model can be used for various natural language processing tasks, especially text generation like chatbots, question-answering, machine translation, and text summarization
Providing mental healthcare to individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP) remains a pressing problem within psychiatry. Because the majority of individuals trained in providing psychiatric care are English speakers, the quality of mental healthcare given to LEP patients is significantly lower than that provided for English speakers. The provision of mental healthcare is contingent on communication and understanding between the patient and healthcare provider, much more so than in the realm of physical healthcare, and English speakers are often unable to comprehend figurative language such as metaphors used by LEPs. Hence, Figurative Language Translation is invaluable to providing equitable psychiatric care. Now, metaphor has been shown to be paramount in both identifying individuals struggling with mental problems and helping those individuals understand and communicate their experiences. Therefore, this paper aims to survey the potential of Machine Translation for providing equitable psychiatric healthcare and highlights the need for further research on the transferability of existing machine and metaphor translation research in the domain of psychiatry.
The primary objective of simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is to minimize latency while preserving the quality of the final translation. Drawing inspiration from CPU branch prediction techniques, we propose incorporating branch prediction techniques in SiMT tasks to reduce translation latency. Specifically, we utilize a language model as a branch predictor to predict potential branch directions, namely, future source words. Subsequently, we utilize the predicted source words to decode the output in advance. When the actual source word deviates from the predicted source word, we use the real source word to decode the output again, replacing the predicted output. To further reduce computational costs, we share the parameters of the encoder and the branch predictor, and utilize a pre-trained language model for initialization. Our proposed method can be seamlessly integrated with any SiMT model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can improve translation quality and latency at the same time. Our code is available at https://github.com/YinAoXiong/simt_branch_predictor .
Large Language Models (LLMs) are adept at text manipulation -- tasks such as machine translation and text summarization. However, these models can also be prone to hallucination, which can be detrimental to the faithfulness of any answers that the model provides. Recent works in combating hallucinations in LLMs deal with identifying hallucinated sentences and categorizing the different ways in which models hallucinate. This paper takes a deep dive into LLM behavior with respect to hallucinations, defines a token-level approach to identifying different kinds of hallucinations, and further utilizes this token-level tagging to improve the interpretability and faithfulness of LLMs in dialogue summarization tasks. Through this, the paper presents a new, enhanced dataset and a new training paradigm.
Large language models (LLMs) have exerted a considerable impact on diverse language-related tasks in recent years. Their demonstrated state-of-the-art performance is achieved through methodologies such as zero-shot or few-shot prompting. These models undergo training on extensive datasets that encompass segments of the Internet and subsequently undergo fine-tuning tailored to specific tasks. Notably, they exhibit proficiency in tasks such as translation, summarization, question answering, and creative writing, even in the absence of explicit training for those particular tasks. While they have shown substantial improvement in the multilingual tasks their performance in the code switching, especially for machine translation remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we present an extensive study on the code switching task specifically for the machine translation task comparing multiple LLMs. Our results indicate that despite the LLMs having promising results in the certain tasks, the models with relatively lesser complexity outperform the multilingual large language models in the machine translation task. We posit that the efficacy of multilingual large language models in contextual code switching is constrained by their training methodologies. In contrast, relatively smaller models, when trained and fine-tuned on bespoke datasets, may yield superior results in comparison to the majority of multilingual models.
This paper presents the outcomes of fine-tuning Mistral 7B, a general-purpose large language model (LLM), for adaptive machine translation (MT). The fine-tuning process involves utilising a combination of zero-shot and one-shot translation prompts within the medical domain. The primary objective is to enhance real-time adaptive MT capabilities of Mistral 7B, enabling it to adapt translations to the required domain at inference time. The results, particularly for Spanish-to-English MT, showcase the efficacy of the fine-tuned model, demonstrating quality improvements in both zero-shot and one-shot translation scenarios, surpassing Mistral 7B's baseline performance. Notably, the fine-tuned Mistral outperforms ChatGPT "gpt-3.5-turbo" in zero-shot translation while achieving comparable one-shot translation quality. Moreover, the zero-shot translation of the fine-tuned Mistral matches NLLB 3.3B's performance, and its one-shot translation quality surpasses that of NLLB 3.3B. These findings emphasise the significance of fine-tuning efficient LLMs like Mistral 7B to yield high-quality zero-shot translations comparable to task-oriented models like NLLB 3.3B. Additionally, the adaptive gains achieved in one-shot translation are comparable to those of commercial LLMs such as ChatGPT. Our experiments demonstrate that, with a relatively small dataset of 20,000 segments that incorporate a mix of zero-shot and one-shot prompts, fine-tuning significantly enhances Mistral's in-context learning ability, especially for real-time adaptive MT.
Time efficiency is paramount for the localisation industry, which demands ever-faster turnaround times. However, translation speed is largely underresearched, and there is a lack of clarity about how language service providers (LSPs) can evaluate the performance of their post-editing (PE) and human translation (HT) services. This study constitutes the first large-scale investigation of translation and revision speed in HT and in the PE of neural machine translation, based on real-world data from an LSP. It uses an exploratory data analysis approach to investigate data for 90 million words translated by 879 linguists across 11 language pairs, over 2.5 years. The results of this research indicate that (a) PE is usually but not always faster than HT; (b) average speed values may be misleading; (c) translation speed is highly variable; and (d) edit distance cannot be used as a proxy for post-editing productivity, because it does not correlate strongly with speed.
Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (UNMT) focuses on improving NMT results under the assumption there is no human translated parallel data, yet little work has been done so far in highlighting its advantages compared to supervised methods and analyzing its output in aspects other than translation accuracy. We focus on three very diverse languages, French, Gujarati, and Kazakh, and train bilingual NMT models, to and from English, with various levels of supervision, in high- and low- resource setups, measure quality of the NMT output and compare the generated sequences' word order and semantic similarity to source and reference sentences. We also use Layer-wise Relevance Propagation to evaluate the source and target sentences' contribution to the result, expanding the findings of previous works to the UNMT paradigm.
This work introduces a new Transformer model called Cached Transformer, which uses Gated Recurrent Cached (GRC) attention to extend the self-attention mechanism with a differentiable memory cache of tokens. GRC attention enables attending to both past and current tokens, increasing the receptive field of attention and allowing for exploring long-range dependencies. By utilizing a recurrent gating unit to continuously update the cache, our model achieves significant advancements in \textbf{six} language and vision tasks, including language modeling, machine translation, ListOPs, image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. Furthermore, our approach surpasses previous memory-based techniques in tasks such as language modeling and displays the ability to be applied to a broader range of situations.
Human translators linger on some words and phrases more than others, and predicting this variation is a step towards explaining the underlying cognitive processes. Using data from the CRITT Translation Process Research Database, we evaluate the extent to which surprisal and attentional features derived from a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model account for reading and production times of human translators. We find that surprisal and attention are complementary predictors of translation difficulty, and that surprisal derived from a NMT model is the single most successful predictor of production duration. Our analyses draw on data from hundreds of translators operating across 13 language pairs, and represent the most comprehensive investigation of human translation difficulty to date.
Automatic Post-Editing (APE) is the task of automatically identifying and correcting errors in the Machine Translation (MT) outputs. We propose a repair-filter-use methodology that uses an APE system to correct errors on the target side of the MT training data. We select the sentence pairs from the original and corrected sentence pairs based on the quality scores computed using a Quality Estimation (QE) model. To the best of our knowledge, this is a novel adaptation of APE and QE to extract quality parallel corpus from the pseudo-parallel corpus. By training with this filtered corpus, we observe an improvement in the Machine Translation system's performance by 5.64 and 9.91 BLEU points, for English-Marathi and Marathi-English, over the baseline model. The baseline model is the one that is trained on the whole pseudo-parallel corpus. Our work is not limited by the characteristics of English or Marathi languages; and is language pair-agnostic, given the necessary QE and APE data.
The growing popularity of neural machine translation (NMT) and LLMs represented by ChatGPT underscores the need for a deeper understanding of their distinct characteristics and relationships. Such understanding is crucial for language professionals and researchers to make informed decisions and tactful use of these cutting-edge translation technology, but remains underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating three key questions: (1) the distinguishability of ChatGPT-generated translations from NMT and human translation (HT), (2) the linguistic characteristics of each translation type, and (3) the degree of resemblance between ChatGPT-produced translations and HT or NMT. To achieve these objectives, we employ statistical testing, machine learning algorithms, and multidimensional analysis (MDA) to analyze Spokesperson's Remarks and their translations. After extracting a wide range of linguistic features, supervised classifiers demonstrate high accuracy in distinguishing the three translation types, whereas unsupervised clustering techniques do not yield satisfactory results. Another major finding is that ChatGPT-produced translations exhibit greater similarity with NMT than HT in most MDA dimensions, which is further corroborated by distance computing and visualization. These novel insights shed light on the interrelationships among the three translation types and have implications for the future advancements of NMT and generative AI.