We introduce a multilingual extension of the HOLISTICBIAS dataset, the largest English template-based taxonomy of textual people references: MULTILINGUALHOLISTICBIAS. This extension consists of 20,459 sentences in 50 languages distributed across all 13 demographic axes. Source sentences are built from combinations of 118 demographic descriptors and three patterns, excluding nonsensical combinations. Multilingual translations include alternatives for gendered languages that cover gendered translations when there is ambiguity in English. Our benchmark is intended to uncover demographic imbalances and be the tool to quantify mitigations towards them. Our initial findings show that translation quality for EN-to-XX translations is an average of 8 spBLEU better when evaluating with the masculine human reference compared to feminine. In the opposite direction, XX-to-EN, we compare the robustness of the model when the source input only differs in gender (masculine or feminine) and masculine translations are an average of almost 4 spBLEU better than feminine. When embedding sentences to a joint multilingual sentence representations space, we find that for most languages masculine translations are significantly closer to the English neutral sentences when embedded.
Multilingual Language Models (\MLLMs) such as mBERT, XLM, XLM-R, \textit{etc.} have emerged as a viable option for bringing the power of pretraining to a large number of languages. Given their success in zero-shot transfer learning, there has emerged a large body of work in (i) building bigger \MLLMs~covering a large number of languages (ii) creating exhaustive benchmarks covering a wider variety of tasks and languages for evaluating \MLLMs~ (iii) analysing the performance of \MLLMs~on monolingual, zero-shot cross-lingual and bilingual tasks (iv) understanding the universal language patterns (if any) learnt by \MLLMs~ and (v) augmenting the (often) limited capacity of \MLLMs~ to improve their performance on seen or even unseen languages. In this survey, we review the existing literature covering the above broad areas of research pertaining to \MLLMs. Based on our survey, we recommend some promising directions of future research.
We introduce an architecture to learn joint multilingual sentence representations for 93 languages, belonging to more than 30 different families and written in 28 different scripts. Our system uses a single BiLSTM encoder with a shared BPE vocabulary for all languages, which is coupled with an auxiliary decoder and trained on publicly available parallel corpora. This enables us to learn a classifier on top of the resulting embeddings using English annotated data only, and transfer it to any of the 93 languages without any modification. Our experiments in cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI dataset), cross-lingual document classification (MLDoc dataset) and parallel corpus mining (BUCC dataset) show the effectiveness of our approach. We also introduce a new test set of aligned sentences in 112 languages, and show that our sentence embeddings obtain strong results in multilingual similarity search even for low-resource languages. Our implementation, the pre-trained encoder and the multilingual test set are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER
In this paper, we use the framework of neural machine translation to learn joint sentence representations across six very different languages. Our aim is that a representation which is independent of the language, is likely to capture the underlying semantics. We define a new cross-lingual similarity measure, compare up to 1.4M sentence representations and study the characteristics of close sentences. We provide experimental evidence that sentences that are close in embedding space are indeed semantically highly related, but often have quite different structure and syntax. These relations also hold when comparing sentences in different languages.