Thailand

Using large language models, this paper presents techniques to improve extremely low-resourced indigenous language translations. Our approaches are grounded in the use of (1) the presence of a datastore consisting of a limited number of parallel translation examples, (2) the inherent capabilities of LLMs like GPT-3.5, and (3) a word-level translation dictionary. We harness the potential of LLMs and in-context learning techniques in such a setting for using LLM as universal translators for extremely low-resourced languages. Our methodology hinges on utilizing LLMs as language compilers for selected language pairs, hypothesizing that they could internalize syntactic structures to facilitate accurate translation. We introduce three techniques: KNN-Prompting with Retrieved Prompting Context, Chain-of-Thought Prompting, and Learning-from-Mistakes Prompting, with the last method addressing past errors. The evaluation results suggest that, even with limited corpora, LLMs, when paired with proper prompting, can effectively translate extremely low-resource languages.

ACL 2024

Learning-From-Mistakes Prompting for Indigenous Language Translation

extremely low resource language

workshop paper

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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.

Domain adaptation is crucial in the clinical domain since the performance of a model trained on one domain (source) degrades seriously when applied to another domain (target).
However, conventional domain adaptation methods often cannot be applied due to data sharing restrictions on source data.
Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) addresses this issue by only utilizing a source model and unlabeled target data to adapt to the target domain.
In SFDA, self-training is the most widely applied method involving retraining models with target data using predictions from the source model as pseudo-labels. Nevertheless, this approach is prone to contain substantial numbers of errors in pseudo-labeling and might limit model performance in the target domain.
In this paper, we propose a Source-Free Prototype-based Self-training (SFPS) aiming to improve the performance of self-training.
SFPS generates prototypes without accessing source data and utilizes them for prototypical learning, namely prototype-based pseudo-labeling and contrastive learning.
Also, we compare entropy-based, centroid-based, and class-weights-based prototype generation methods to identify the most effective formulation of the proposed method.
Experimental results across various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, consistently outperforming vanilla self-training. 
The comparison of various prototype-generation methods identifies the most reliable generation method that improves the source model persistently. Additionally, our analysis illustrates SFPS can successfully alleviate errors in pseudo-labeling.

Improving Self-training with Prototypical Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation on Clinical Text

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Adopting Ensemble Learning for Cross-lingual Classification of Crisis-related Text On Social Media

This paper investigates the finetuning of end-to-end models for bidirectional Estonian-English and Estonian-Russian conversational speech-to-text translation. Due to the limited availability of speech translation data for Estonian, we created additional training data by web scraping and synthesizing data from speech recognition datasets using machine translation. We evaluated three publicly available end-to-end models: Whisper, OWSM 3.1, and SeamlessM4T. Our results indicate that fine-tuning with synthetic data enhances translation accuracy by a large margin, with SeamlessM4T matching or surpassing cascaded speech translation systems that use state-of-the-art speech recognition and machine translation models.

Finetuning End-to-End Models for Estonian Conversational Spoken Language Translation

Assessing the performance of machine translation systems is of critical value, especially to languages with lower resource availability.
Due to the large evaluation effort required by the translation task, studies often compare new systems against single systems or commercial solutions. Consequently, determining the best-performing system for specific languages is often unclear. 
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Learning-From-Mistakes Prompting for Indigenous Language Translation

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Improving Self-training with Prototypical Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation on Clinical Text

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