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Multilingual neural machine translation models generally distinguish translation directions by the language tag (LT) in front of the source or target sentences. However, current LT strategies cannot indicate the desired target language as expected on zero-shot translation, i.e., the off-target issue. Our analysis reveals that the indication of the target language is sensitive to the placement of the target LT. For example, when placing the target LT on the decoder side, the indication would rapidly degrade along with decoding steps, while placing the target LT on the encoder side would lead to copying or paraphrasing the source input. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective strategy named Language Converter Strategy (LCS). By introducing the target language embedding into the top encoder layers, LCS mitigates confusion in the encoder and ensures stable language indication for the decoder. Experimental results on MultiUN, TED, and OPUS-100 datasets demonstrate that LCS could significantly mitigate the off-target issue, with language accuracy up to 95.28%, 96.21%, and 85.35% meanwhile outperforming the vanilla LT strategy by 3.07, 3,3, and 7.93 BLEU scores on zero-shot translation, respectively.

ACL 2024

LCS: A Language Converter Strategy for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation

language tag strategy

off-target issue

zero-shot machine translation

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Quantitative reasoning is a critical skill to analyze data, yet the assessment of such ability remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce the Quantitative Reasoning with Data (QRData) benchmark, aiming to evaluate Large Language Models' capability in statistical and causal reasoning with real-world data. The benchmark comprises a carefully constructed dataset of 411 questions accompanied by data sheets from textbooks, online learning materials, and academic papers. To compare models' quantitative reasoning abilities on data and text, we enrich the benchmark with an auxiliary set of 290 text-only questions, namely QRText. 
We evaluate natural language reasoning, program-based reasoning, and agent reasoning methods including Chain-of-Thought, Program-of-Thoughts, ReAct, and code interpreter assistants on diverse models. 
The strongest model GPT-4 achieves an accuracy of 58%, which has much room for improvement. Among open-source models, Deepseek-coder-instruct, a code LLM pretrained on 2T tokens, gets the highest accuracy of 37%. Analysis reveals that models encounter difficulties in data analysis and causal reasoning, and struggle in using causal knowledge and provided data simultaneously. Code and data are in https://github.com/xxxiaol/QRData.

Are LLMs Capable of Data-based Statistical and Causal Reasoning? Benchmarking Advanced Quantitative Reasoning with Data

Large language models (LLMs) are notorious for hallucinating, i.e., producing erroneous claims in their output. Such hallucinations can be dangerous, as occasional factual inaccuracies in the generated text might be obscured by the rest of the output being generally factually correct, making it extremely hard for the users to spot them. Current services that leverage LLMs usually do not provide any means for detecting unreliable generations. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we propose a novel fact-checking and hallucination detection pipeline based on token-level uncertainty quantification. Uncertainty scores leverage information encapsulated in the output of a neural network or its layers to detect unreliable predictions, and we show that they can be used to fact-check the atomic claims in the LLM output. Moreover, we present a novel token-level uncertainty quantification method that removes the impact of uncertainty about what claim to generate on the current step and what surface form to use. Our method Claim Conditioned Probability (CCP) measures only the uncertainty of a particular claim value expressed by the model. Experiments on the task of biography generation demonstrate strong improvements for CCP compared to the baselines for seven different LLMs and four languages. Human evaluation reveals that the fact-checking pipeline based on uncertainty quantification is competitive with a fact-checking tool that leverages external knowledge.

Fact-Checking the Output of Large Language Models via Token-Level Uncertainty Quantification

Neural Machine Translation models are extremely data and compute-hungry. However, not all data
points contribute equally to model training and generalization. Data pruning to remove the low-
value data points has the benefit of drastically reducing the compute budget without significant
drop in model performance. In this paper, we propose a new data pruning technique: Checkpoints
Across Time (CAT ), that leverages early model training dynamics to identify the most relevant
data points for model performance. We benchmark CAT against several data pruning techniques
including COMET-QE, LASER and LaBSE. We find that CAT outperforms the benchmarks on
Indo-European languages on multiple test sets. When applied to English-German, English-French
and English-Swahili translation tasks, CAT achieves comparable performance to using the full
dataset, while pruning up to 50% of training data. We inspect the data points that CAT selects
and find that it tends to favour longer sentences and sentences with unique or rare words.

Critical Learning Periods: Leveraging Early Training Dynamics for Efficient Data Pruning

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful dialogue agents, but specializing them towards fulfilling a specific function can be challenging. Instructing tuning, i.e. tuning models on instruction and sample responses generated by humans (Ouyang et al., 2022), has proven as an effective method to do so, yet requires a number of data samples that a) might not be available or b) costly to generate. Furthermore, this cost increases when the goal is to make the LLM follow a specific workflow within a dialogue instead of single instructions. Inspired by the self-play technique in reinforcement learning and the use of LLMs to simulate human agents, we propose a more effective method for data collection through LLMs engaging in a conversation in various roles. This approach generates a training data via "self-talk" of LLMs that can be refined and utilized for supervised fine-tuning. We introduce an automated way to measure the (partial) success of a dialogue. This metric is used to filter the generated conversational data that is fed back in LLM for training. Based on our automated and human evaluations of conversation quality, we demonstrate that such self-talk data improves results. In addition, we examine the various characteristics that showcase the quality of generated dialogues and how they can be connected to their potential utility as training data.

Bootstrapping LLM-based Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents via Self-Talk

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a successful fine-tuning strategy for aligning large language models with human preferences without the need to train a reward model or employ reinforcement learning. DPO, as originally formulated, relies on binary preference data and fine-tunes a language model to increase the likelihood of a preferred response over a dispreferred response. However, not all preference pairs are equal. Sometimes, the preferred response is only slightly better than the dispreferred one. In other cases, the preference is much stronger. For instance, if a response contains harmful or toxic content, the annotator will have a strong preference for that response. In this paper, we propose a generalization of DPO, termed DPO with an offset (ODPO), that does not treat every preference pair equally during fine-tuning. Intuitively, ODPO requires the difference between the likelihood of the preferred and dispreferred response to be greater than an offset value. The offset is determined based on the extent to which one response is preferred over another. Our experiments on various tasks suggest that ODPO significantly outperforms DPO in aligning language models, especially when the number of preference pairs is limited.

Direct Preference Optimization with an Offset

Recently, there has been growing interest within the community regarding whether large language models are capable of planning or executing plans. However, most prior studies use LLMs to generate high-level plans for simplified scenarios lacking linguistic complexity and domain diversity, limiting analysis of their planning abilities. These setups constrain evaluation methods (e.g., predefined action space), architectural choices (e.g., only generative models), and overlook the linguistic nuances essential for realistic analysis. To tackle this, we present PARADISE, an abductive reasoning task using Q&A format on practical procedural text sourced from wikiHow. It involves tip and warning inference tasks directly associated with goals, excluding intermediary steps, with the aim of testing the ability of the models to infer implicit knowledge of the plan solely from the given goal. Our experiments, utilizing fine-tuned language models and zero-shot prompting, reveal the effectiveness of task-specific small models over large language models in most scenarios. Despite advancements, all models fall short of human performance. Notably, our analysis uncovers intriguing insights, such as variations in model behavior with dropped keywords, struggles of BERT-family and GPT-4 with physical and abstract goals, and the proposed tasks offering valuable prior knowledge for other unseen procedural tasks. The PARADISE dataset and associated resources are publicly available for further research exploration with https://anonymous.4open.science/r/paradise-53BD/README.md.

PARADISE: Evaluating Implicit Planning Skills of Language Models with Procedural Warnings and Tips Dataset

Emotion plays a crucial role in human conversation. This paper underscores the significance of considering emotion in speech translation. We present the MELD-ST dataset for the emotion-aware speech translation task, comprising English-to-Japanese and English-to-German language pairs. Each language pair includes about 10,000 utterances annotated with emotion labels from the MELD dataset. Baseline experiments using the SeamlessM4T model on the dataset indicate that fine-tuning with emotion labels can enhance translation performance in some settings, highlighting the need for further research in emotion-aware speech translation systems.

MELD-ST: An Emotion-aware Speech Translation Dataset

A single language model, even when aligned with labelers through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), may not suit all human preferences. Recent approaches therefore prefer customization, gathering multi-dimensional feedback, and creating distinct reward models for each dimension.
Different language models are then optimized for various preferences using multi-objective RLHF (MORLHF) with varying reward weights.
However, RL fine-tuning is unstable and resource-heavy, especially with diverse and usually conflicting objectives.
In this paper, we present Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO), an RL-free extension of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for multiple alignment objectives.
Essentially, MODPO folds language modeling directly into reward modeling, training language models as implicit collective reward models that combine all objectives with specific weights.
MODPO theoretically yields the same optimal solutions as MORLHF but is practically more stable and efficient.
Empirical results in safety alignment and long-form question answering show that MODPO matches or outperforms existing methods, producing a Pareto front of language models catering to diverse preferences with three times less computational resources compared to MORLHF.
Code is available at https://github.com/ZHZisZZ/modpo.

Beyond One-Preference-Fits-All Alignment: Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization

Equipping a conversational search engine with strategies regarding when to ask clarification questions is becoming increasingly important across various domains. 
Attributing to the context understanding capability of LLMs and their access to domain-specific sources of knowledge, LLM-based clarification strategies feature rapid transfer to various domains in a post-hoc manner.
However, they still struggle to deliver promising performance on unseen domains, struggling to achieve effective domain transferability.
We take the first step to investigate this issue and existing methods tend to produce one-size-fits-all strategies across diverse domains, limiting their search effectiveness.
In response, we introduce a novel method, called STYLE,
to achieve effective domain transferability.
Our experimental results indicate that STYLE bears strong domain transferability, resulting in an average search performance improvement of 10% on four unseen domains.

STYLE: Improving Domain Transferability of Asking Clarification Questions in Large Language Model Powered Conversational Agents

Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose \textbf{iSign}: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than \iSignCountShort video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the working of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/

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LCS: A Language Converter Strategy for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation

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