This study provides an overview of the history of the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the context of the Indonesian language, with a focus on the basic technologies, methods, and practical applications that have been developed. This review covers developments in basic NLP technologies such as stemming, part-of-speech tagging, and related methods; practical applications in cross-language information retrieval systems, information extraction, and sentiment analysis; and methods and techniques used in Indonesian language NLP research, such as machine learning, statistics-based machine translation, and conflict-based approaches. This study also explores the application of NLP in Indonesian language industry and research and identifies challenges and opportunities in Indonesian language NLP research and development. Recommendations for future Indonesian language NLP research and development include developing more efficient methods and technologies, expanding NLP applications, increasing sustainability, further research into the potential of NLP, and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. It is hoped that this review will help researchers, practitioners, and the government to understand the development of Indonesian language NLP and identify opportunities for further research and development.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have exhibited remarkable abilities on a wide range of natural language processing~(NLP) tasks, including various machine translation abilities accomplished during chat. However, these models are only accessible through restricted APIs, which creates barriers to new research and advancements in the field. Therefore, we propose ParroT, a framework to enhance and regulate the translation abilities during chat based on open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA), human-written translation and feedback data. Specifically, ParroT reformulates translation data into the instruction-following style, and introduces a "$\mathbf{Hint}$" field for incorporating extra requirements to regulate the translation process. Accordingly, we propose three instruction types for finetuning ParroT models, including translation instruction, contrastive instruction, and error-guided instruction. Experiments on Flores subsets and WMT22 test sets suggest that translation instruction improves the translation performance of vanilla LLMs significantly while error-guided instruction can lead to further improvement, which demonstrates the importance of learning from low-quality translations annotated by humans. We also demonstrate the potential of automatic evaluation tools in providing quality information of translations, when constructing error-guided instructions for directions that lack human annotation data. Please refer to our Github project for more implementation details: https://github.com/wxjiao/ParroT
The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine translation relies heavily on the abilities of language understanding and generation. Thus, in this paper, we explore how to assist machine translation with ChatGPT. We adopt several translation prompts on a wide range of translations. Our experimental results show that ChatGPT with designed translation prompts can achieve comparable or better performance over commercial translation systems for high-resource language translations. We further evaluate the translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT achieves superior performance compared to commercial systems. We also conduct experiments on domain-specific translations, the final results show that ChatGPT is able to comprehend the provided domain keyword and adjust accordingly to output proper translations. At last, we perform few-shot prompts that show consistent improvement across different base prompts. Our work provides empirical evidence that ChatGPT still has great potential in translations.
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can produce coherent, cohesive, relevant, and fluent answers for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Taking document-level machine translation (MT) as a testbed, this paper provides an in-depth evaluation of LLMs' ability on discourse modeling. The study focuses on three aspects: 1) Effects of Context-Aware Prompts, where we investigate the impact of different prompts on document-level translation quality and discourse phenomena; 2) Comparison of Translation Models, where we compare the translation performance of ChatGPT with commercial MT systems and advanced document-level MT methods; 3) Analysis of Discourse Modelling Abilities, where we further probe discourse knowledge encoded in LLMs and shed light on impacts of training techniques on discourse modeling. By evaluating on a number of benchmarks, we surprisingly find that LLMs have demonstrated superior performance and show potential to become a new paradigm for document-level translation: 1) leveraging their powerful long-text modeling capabilities, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 outperform commercial MT systems in terms of human evaluation; 2) GPT-4 demonstrates a stronger ability for probing linguistic knowledge than GPT-3.5. This work highlights the challenges and opportunities of LLMs for MT, which we hope can inspire the future design and evaluation of LLMs.We release our data and annotations at https://github.com/longyuewangdcu/Document-MT-LLM.
We present a simple cross-lingual plagiarism detection method applicable to a large number of languages. The presented approach leverages open multilingual thesauri for candidate retrieval task and pre-trained multilingual BERT-based language models for detailed analysis. The method does not rely on machine translation and word sense disambiguation when in use, and therefore is suitable for a large number of languages, including under-resourced languages. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated for several existing and new benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results for French, Russian, and Armenian languages.
Multilingual pre-training significantly improves many multilingual NLP tasks, including machine translation. Most existing methods are based on some variants of masked language modeling and text-denoising objectives on monolingual data. Multilingual pre-training on monolingual data ignores the availability of parallel data in many language pairs. Also, some other works integrate the available human-generated parallel translation data in their pre-training. This kind of parallel data is definitely helpful, but it is limited even in high-resource language pairs. This paper introduces a novel semi-supervised method, SPDG, that generates high-quality pseudo-parallel data for multilingual pre-training. First, a denoising model is pre-trained on monolingual data to reorder, add, remove, and substitute words, enhancing the pre-training documents' quality. Then, we generate different pseudo-translations for each pre-training document using dictionaries for word-by-word translation and applying the pre-trained denoising model. The resulting pseudo-parallel data is then used to pre-train our multilingual sequence-to-sequence model, PEACH. Our experiments show that PEACH outperforms existing approaches used in training mT5 and mBART on various translation tasks, including supervised, zero- and few-shot scenarios. Moreover, PEACH's ability to transfer knowledge between similar languages makes it particularly useful for low-resource languages. Our results demonstrate that with high-quality dictionaries for generating accurate pseudo-parallel, PEACH can be valuable for low-resource languages.
The advent of deep learning has led to a significant gain in machine translation. However, most of the studies required a large parallel dataset which is scarce and expensive to construct and even unavailable for some languages. This paper presents a simple yet effective method to tackle this problem for low-resource languages by augmenting high-quality sentence pairs and training NMT models in a semi-supervised manner. Specifically, our approach combines the cross-entropy loss for supervised learning with KL Divergence for unsupervised fashion given pseudo and augmented target sentences derived from the model. We also introduce a SentenceBERT-based filter to enhance the quality of augmenting data by retaining semantically similar sentence pairs. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves NMT baselines, especially on low-resource datasets with 0.46--2.03 BLEU scores. We also demonstrate that using unsupervised training for augmented data is more efficient than reusing the ground-truth target sentences for supervised learning.
Multimodal learning, which aims to understand and analyze information from multiple modalities, has achieved substantial progress in the supervised regime in recent years. However, the heavy dependence on data paired with expensive human annotations impedes scaling up models. Meanwhile, given the availability of large-scale unannotated data in the wild, self-supervised learning has become an attractive strategy to alleviate the annotation bottleneck. Building on these two directions, self-supervised multimodal learning (SSML) provides ways to learn from raw multimodal data. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in SSML, in which we elucidate three major challenges intrinsic to self-supervised learning with multimodal data: (1) learning representations from multimodal data without labels, (2) fusion of different modalities, and (3) learning with unaligned data. We then detail existing solutions to these challenges. Specifically, we consider (1) objectives for learning from multimodal unlabeled data via self-supervision, (2) model architectures from the perspective of different multimodal fusion strategies, and (3) pair-free learning strategies for coarse-grained and fine-grained alignment. We also review real-world applications of SSML algorithms in diverse fields such as healthcare, remote sensing, and machine translation. Finally, we discuss challenges and future directions for SSML. A collection of related resources can be found at: https://github.com/ys-zong/awesome-self-supervised-multimodal-learning.
Current research on hate speech analysis is typically oriented towards monolingual and single classification tasks. In this paper, we present a new multilingual hate speech analysis dataset for English, Hindi, Arabic, French, German and Spanish languages for multiple domains across hate speech - Abuse, Racism, Sexism, Religious Hate and Extremism. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to address the problem of identifying various types of hate speech in these five wide domains in these six languages. In this work, we describe how we created the dataset, created annotations at high level and low level for different domains and how we use it to test the current state-of-the-art multilingual and multitask learning approaches. We evaluate our dataset in various monolingual, cross-lingual and machine translation classification settings and compare it against open source English datasets that we aggregated and merged for this task. Then we discuss how this approach can be used to create large scale hate-speech datasets and how to leverage our annotations in order to improve hate speech detection and classification in general.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) offer a promising approach for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, feeding multiple morphologically languages into a single model during training reduces the NMT's performance. In GAN, similar to bilingual models, multilingual NMT only considers one reference translation for each sentence during model training. This single reference translation limits the GAN model from learning sufficient information about the source sentence representation. Thus, in this article, we propose Denoising Adversarial Auto-encoder-based Sentence Interpolation (DAASI) approach to perform sentence interpolation by learning the intermediate latent representation of the source and target sentences of multilingual language pairs. Apart from latent representation, we also use the Wasserstein-GAN approach for the multilingual NMT model by incorporating the model generated sentences of multiple languages for reward computation. This computed reward optimizes the performance of the GAN-based multilingual model in an effective manner. We demonstrate the experiments on low-resource language pairs and find that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches for multilingual NMT with a performance gain of up to 4 BLEU points. Moreover, we use our trained model on zero-shot language pairs under an unsupervised scenario and show the robustness of the proposed approach.
This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yor\`ub\'a greetings ($\varepsilon$ k\'u [MASK]), which are a big part of Yor\`ub\'a language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYor\`ub\'a, a Yor\`ub\'a-English translation dataset containing some Yor\`ub\'a greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yor\`ub\'a greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yor\`ub\'a-English model by finetuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYor\`ub\'a and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.
Benefiting from the sequence-level knowledge distillation, the Non-Autoregressive Transformer (NAT) achieves great success in neural machine translation tasks. However, existing knowledge distillation has side effects, such as propagating errors from the teacher to NAT students, which may limit further improvements of NAT models and are rarely discussed in existing research. In this paper, we introduce selective knowledge distillation by introducing an NAT evaluator to select NAT-friendly targets that are of high quality and easy to learn. In addition, we introduce a simple yet effective progressive distillation method to boost NAT performance. Experiment results on multiple WMT language directions and several representative NAT models show that our approach can realize a flexible trade-off between the quality and complexity of training data for NAT models, achieving strong performances. Further analysis shows that distilling only 5% of the raw translations can help an NAT outperform its counterpart trained on raw data by about 2.4 BLEU.
Sensitising language models (LMs) to external context helps them to more effectively capture the speaking patterns of individuals with specific characteristics or in particular environments. This work investigates to what extent rich character and film annotations can be leveraged to personalise LMs in a scalable manner. We then explore the use of such models in evaluating context specificity in machine translation. We build LMs which leverage rich contextual information to reduce perplexity by up to 6.5% compared to a non-contextual model, and generalise well to a scenario with no speaker-specific data, relying on combinations of demographic characteristics expressed via metadata. Our findings are consistent across two corpora, one of which (Cornell-rich) is also a contribution of this paper. We then use our personalised LMs to measure the co-occurrence of extra-textual context and translation hypotheses in a machine translation setting. Our results suggest that the degree to which professional translations in our domain are context-specific can be preserved to a better extent by a contextual machine translation model than a non-contextual model, which is also reflected in the contextual model's superior reference-based scores.
Large-scale multilingual machine translation systems have demonstrated remarkable ability to translate directly between numerous languages, making them increasingly appealing for real-world applications. However, when deployed in the wild, these models may generate hallucinated translations which have the potential to severely undermine user trust and raise safety concerns. Existing research on hallucinations has primarily focused on small bilingual models trained on high-resource languages, leaving a gap in our understanding of hallucinations in massively multilingual models across diverse translation scenarios. In this work, we fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis on both the M2M family of conventional neural machine translation models and ChatGPT, a general-purpose large language model~(LLM) that can be prompted for translation. Our investigation covers a broad spectrum of conditions, spanning over 100 translation directions across various resource levels and going beyond English-centric language pairs. We provide key insights regarding the prevalence, properties, and mitigation of hallucinations, paving the way towards more responsible and reliable machine translation systems.
In the field of Japanese-Chinese translation linguistics, the issue of correctly translating attributive clauses has persistently proven to be challenging. Present-day machine translation tools often fail to accurately translate attributive clauses from Japanese to Chinese. In light of this, this paper investigates the linguistic problem underlying such difficulties, namely how does the semantic role of the modified noun affect the selection of translation patterns for attributive clauses, from a linguistic perspective. To ad-dress these difficulties, a pre-edit scheme is proposed, which aims to enhance the accuracy of translation. Furthermore, we propose a novel two-step prompt strategy, which combines this pre-edit scheme with ChatGPT, currently the most widely used large language model. This prompt strategy is capable of optimizing translation input in zero-shot scenarios and has been demonstrated to improve the average translation accuracy score by over 35%.
Neural machine translation (NMT) has progressed rapidly over the past several years, and modern models are able to achieve relatively high quality using only monolingual text data, an approach dubbed Unsupervised Machine Translation (UNMT). However, these models still struggle in a variety of ways, including aspects of translation that for a human are the easiest - for instance, correctly translating common nouns. This work explores a cheap and abundant resource to combat this problem: bilingual lexica. We test the efficacy of bilingual lexica in a real-world set-up, on 200-language translation models trained on web-crawled text. We present several findings: (1) using lexical data augmentation, we demonstrate sizable performance gains for unsupervised translation; (2) we compare several families of data augmentation, demonstrating that they yield similar improvements, and can be combined for even greater improvements; (3) we demonstrate the importance of carefully curated lexica over larger, noisier ones, especially with larger models; and (4) we compare the efficacy of multilingual lexicon data versus human-translated parallel data. Finally, we open-source GATITOS (available at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp/tree/main/gatitos), a new multilingual lexicon for 26 low-resource languages, which had the highest performance among lexica in our experiments.
Generative large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across several NLP tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization. Recent research (Kocmi and Federmann, 2023) has shown that utilizing LLMs for assessing the quality of machine translation (MT) achieves state-of-the-art performance at the system level but \textit{performs poorly at the segment level}. To further improve the performance of LLMs on MT quality assessment, we investigate several prompting designs, and propose a new prompting method called \textbf{\texttt{Error Analysis Prompting}} (EAPrompt) by combining Chain-of-Thoughts (Wei et al., 2022) and Error Analysis (Lu et al., 2023). This technique emulates the commonly accepted human evaluation framework - Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM, Freitag et al. (2021)) and \textit{produces explainable and reliable MT evaluations at both the system and segment level}. Experimental Results from the WMT22 metrics shared task validate the effectiveness of EAPrompt on various LLMs, with different structures. Further analysis confirms that EAPrompt effectively distinguishes major errors from minor ones, while also sharing a similar distribution of the number of errors with MQM. These findings highlight the potential of EAPrompt as a human-like evaluator prompting technique for MT evaluation.
ChatGPT shows remarkable capabilities for machine translation (MT). Several prior studies have shown that it achieves comparable results to commercial systems for high-resource languages, but lags behind in complex tasks, e.g., low-resource and distant-language-pairs translation. However, they usually adopt simple prompts which can not fully elicit the capability of ChatGPT. In this paper, we aim to further mine ChatGPT's translation ability by revisiting several aspects: temperature, task information, and domain information, and correspondingly propose an optimal temperature setting and two (simple but effective) prompts: Task-Specific Prompts (TSP) and Domain-Specific Prompts (DSP). We show that: 1) The performance of ChatGPT depends largely on temperature, and a lower temperature usually can achieve better performance; 2) Emphasizing the task information can further improve ChatGPT's performance, particularly in complex MT tasks; 3) Introducing domain information can elicit ChatGPT's generalization ability and improve its performance in the specific domain; 4) ChatGPT tends to generate hallucinations for non-English-centric MT tasks, which can be partially addressed by our proposed prompts but still need to be highlighted for the MT/NLP community. We also explore the effects of advanced in-context learning strategies and find a (negative but interesting) observation: the powerful chain-of-thought prompt leads to word-by-word translation behavior, thus bringing significant translation degradation.
This study presents a novel model for invertible sentence embeddings using a residual recurrent network trained on an unsupervised encoding task. Rather than the probabilistic outputs common to neural machine translation models, our approach employs a regression-based output layer to reconstruct the input sequence's word vectors. The model achieves high accuracy and fast training with the ADAM optimizer, a significant finding given that RNNs typically require memory units, such as LSTMs, or second-order optimization methods. We incorporate residual connections and introduce a "match drop" technique, where gradients are calculated only for incorrect words. Our approach demonstrates potential for various natural language processing applications, particularly in neural network-based systems that require high-quality sentence embeddings.
Chatbots have long been capable of answering basic questions and even responding to obscure prompts, but recently their improvements have been far more significant. Modern chatbots like Open AIs ChatGPT3 not only have the ability to answer basic questions but can write code and movie scripts and imitate well-known people. In this paper, we analyze ChatGPTs' responses to various questions from a dataset of queries from the popular Quora forum. We submitted sixty questions to ChatGPT and scored the answers based on three industry-standard metrics for grading machine translation: BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE. These metrics allow us to compare the machine responses with the most upvoted human answer to the same question to assess ChatGPT's ability to submit a humanistic reply. The results showed that while the responses and translation abilities of ChatGPT are remarkable, they still fall short of what a typical human reaction would be.