Development of language proficiency models for non-native learners has been an active area of interest in NLP research for the past few years. Although language proficiency is multidimensional in nature, existing research typically considers a single "overall proficiency" while building models. Further, existing approaches also considers only one language at a time. This paper describes our experiments and observations about the role of pre-trained and fine-tuned multilingual embeddings in performing multi-dimensional, multilingual language proficiency classification. We report experiments with three languages -- German, Italian, and Czech -- and model seven dimensions of proficiency ranging from vocabulary control to sociolinguistic appropriateness. Our results indicate that while fine-tuned embeddings are useful for multilingual proficiency modeling, none of the features achieve consistently best performance for all dimensions of language proficiency. All code, data and related supplementary material can be found at: https://github.com/nishkalavallabhi/MultidimCEFRScoring.
The AI Language Proficiency Monitor -- Tracking the Progress of LLMs on Multilingual Benchmarks
Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ)（经济合作与发展部）；Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)（国际发展合作署）；Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
本文提出AI Language Proficiency Monitor，一个评估多达200种语言（含低资源语言）的多语言基准，整合翻译、问答等任务，提供开源自动更新的排行榜和仪表板，促进多语言AI的透明与包容。
UniversalCEFR: Enabling Open Multilingual Research on Language Proficiency Assessment
University of Bath（巴斯大学）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；National University Philippines（菲律宾国家大学）；Bielefeld University（比勒菲尔德大学）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）；UCLouvain（列日大学）；MBZUAI（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Brigham Young University（Brigham Young 大学）；INESC-ID Lisboa（里斯本 INESC-ID）；Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL)（里斯本大学学院（ISCTE-IUL））；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法华大学）；National Research Council, Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；King Abdulaziz University（国王阿卜杜勒-阿齐兹大学）
Let's Simplify Step by Step: Guiding LLM Towards Multilingual Unsupervised Proficiency-Controlled Sentence Simplification
Department of Computer Science, School of Information Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（计算机科学系，信息科学与技术学院，广东外语外贸大学）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（智能与计算学院，天津大学）；Lionrock AI Lab, China Merchants Research Institute of Advanced Technology（Lionrock AI实验室，中国远洋科技研究院）
Applied Linguistics and Technology Program（应用语言学与技术项目）；Iowa State University, USA（美国爱荷华州立大学）；Department of Informatics（信息学系）；University of Oslo, Norway（挪威奥斯陆大学）
The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) guidelines describe language proficiency of learners on a scale of 6 levels. While the description of CEFR guidelines is generic across languages, the development of automated proficiency classification systems for different languages follow different approaches. In this paper, we explore universal CEFR classification using domain-specific and domain-agnostic, theory-guided as well as data-driven features. We report the results of our preliminary experiments in monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual classification with three languages: Ge…
In contrast to many decades of research on oral code-switching, the study of written multilingual productions has only recently enjoyed a surge of interest. Many open questions remain regarding the sociolinguistic underpinnings of written code-switching, and progress has been limited by a lack of suitable resources. We introduce a novel, large, and diverse dataset of written code-switched productions, curated from topical threads of multiple bilingual communities on the Reddit discussion platform, and explore questions that were mainly addressed in the context of spoken language thus far. We i…
Multilingualism refers to the high degree of proficiency in two or more languages in the written and oral communication modes. It often results in language mixing, a.k.a. code-mixing, when a multilingual speaker switches between multiple languages in a single utterance of a text or speech. This paper discusses the current state of the NLP research, limitations, and foreseeable pitfalls in addressing five real-world applications for social good crisis management, healthcare, political campaigning, fake news, and hate speech for multilingual societies. We also propose futuristic datasets, models…
Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；School of Information, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息学院）
Translation as a Scalable Proxy for Multilingual Evaluation
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；African Languages Lab（非洲语言实验室）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）
We introduce XED, a multilingual fine-grained emotion dataset. The dataset consists of human-annotated Finnish (25k) and English sentences (30k), as well as projected annotations for 30 additional languages, providing new resources for many low-resource languages. We use Plutchik's core emotions to annotate the dataset with the addition of neutral to create a multilabel multiclass dataset. The dataset is carefully evaluated using language-specific BERT models and SVMs to show that XED performs on par with other similar datasets and is therefore a useful tool for sentiment analysis and emotion …
We describe the Uppsala NLP submission to SemEval-2021 Task 2 on multilingual and cross-lingual word-in-context disambiguation. We explore the usefulness of three pre-trained multilingual language models, XLM-RoBERTa (XLMR), Multilingual BERT (mBERT) and multilingual distilled BERT (mDistilBERT). We compare these three models in two setups, fine-tuning and as feature extractors. In the second case we also experiment with using dependency-based information. We find that fine-tuning is better than feature extraction. XLMR performs better than mBERT in the cross-lingual setting both with fine-tun…
Pre-trained multilingual language models have become an important building block in multilingual natural language processing. In the present paper, we investigate a range of such models to find out how well they transfer discourse-level knowledge across languages. This is done with a systematic evaluation on a broader set of discourse-level tasks than has been previously been assembled. We find that the XLM-RoBERTa family of models consistently show the best performance, by simultaneously being good monolingual models and degrading relatively little in a zero-shot setting. Our results also ind…
Challenges and Recommendations for LLM-as-a-Judge in Multilingual Settings and for Low-Resource Languages
LT3, IDLab, Universiteit Gent, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, LMU Munich & Munich Center for Machine Learning, German Center for Addiction Research in Childhood and Adolescence, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Mila - Quebec AI Institute, McGill University, Canada CIFAR AI Chair（LT3、IDLab、根特大学、巴塞罗那超级计算中心、慕尼黑莱茵河大学及慕尼黑机器学习中心、德国成年期成瘾研究中心、汉堡埃彭多夫大学医学中心、魁北克人工智能研究所、麦吉尔大学、加拿大 CIFAR 人工智能主席）
Parallel Universes, Parallel Languages: A Comprehensive Study on LLM-based Multilingual Counterfactual Example Generation
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；University of Marburg（马尔堡大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心（MCML））；BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data（柏林学习与数据基础研究所（BIFOLD））
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Idiap Research Institute（Idiap研究所）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；ICREA（加泰罗尼亚研究与高等教育学院）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；AMPLYFI（AMPLYFI公司）
Recognizing and categorizing lexical collocations in context is useful for language learning, dictionary compilation and downstream NLP. However, it is a challenging task due to the varying degrees of frozenness lexical collocations exhibit. In this paper, we put forward a sequence tagging BERT-based model enhanced with a graph-aware transformer architecture, which we evaluate on the task of collocation recognition in context. Our results suggest that explicitly encoding syntactic dependencies in the model architecture is helpful, and provide insights on differences in collocation typification…
Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University（查理大学数学与物理学院）
Multilingual BERT (mBERT) provides sentence representations for 104 languages, which are useful for many multi-lingual tasks. Previous work probed the cross-linguality of mBERT using zero-shot transfer learning on morphological and syntactic tasks. We instead focus on the semantic properties of mBERT. We show that mBERT representations can be split into a language-specific component and a language-neutral component, and that the language-neutral component is sufficiently general in terms of modeling semantics to allow high-accuracy word-alignment and sentence retrieval but is not yet good enou…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Knowledge bases (KBs) contain plenty of structured world and commonsense knowledge. As such, they often complement distributional text-based information and facilitate various downstream tasks. Since their manual construction is resource- and time-intensive, recent efforts have tried leveraging large pretrained language models (PLMs) to generate additional monolingual knowledge facts for KBs. However, such methods have not been attempted for building and enriching multilingual KBs. Besides wider application, such multilingual KBs can provide richer combined knowledge than monolingual (e.g., En…
Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心（CIS））；Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas, Philipps University Marburg（马尔堡菲利普大学德国语言地图集研究中心）
With more than 7000 languages worldwide, multilingual natural language processing (NLP) is essential both from an academic and commercial perspective. Researching typological properties of languages is fundamental for progress in multilingual NLP. Examples include assessing language similarity for effective transfer learning, injecting inductive biases into machine learning models or creating resources such as dictionaries and inflection tables. We provide ParCourE, an online tool that allows to browse a word-aligned parallel corpus, covering 1334 languages. We give evidence that this is usefu…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Computer Science Division（计算机科学系）
We propose procedures for evaluating and strengthening contextual embedding alignment and show that they are useful in analyzing and improving multilingual BERT. In particular, after our proposed alignment procedure, BERT exhibits significantly improved zero-shot performance on XNLI compared to the base model, remarkably matching pseudo-fully-supervised translate-train models for Bulgarian and Greek. Further, to measure the degree of alignment, we introduce a contextual version of word retrieval and show that it correlates well with downstream zero-shot transfer. Using this word retrieval task…
Relation classification is one of the key topics in information extraction, which can be used to construct knowledge bases or to provide useful information for question answering. Current approaches for relation classification are mainly focused on the English language and require lots of training data with human annotations. Creating and annotating a large amount of training data for low-resource languages is impractical and expensive. To overcome this issue, we propose two cross-lingual relation classification models: a baseline model based on Multilingual BERT and a new multilingual pretrai…
Multilinguality is gradually becoming ubiquitous in the sense that more and more researchers have successfully shown that using additional languages help improve the results in many Natural Language Processing tasks. Multilingual Multiway Corpora (MMC) contain the same sentence in multiple languages. Such corpora have been primarily used for Multi-Source and Pivot Language Machine Translation but are also useful for developing multilingual sequence taggers by transfer learning. While these corpora are available, they are not organized for multilingual experiments and researchers need to write …
The CMU Wilderness Multilingual Speech Dataset (Black, 2019) is a newly published multilingual speech dataset based on recorded readings of the New Testament. It provides data to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for potentially 700 languages. However, the fact that the source content (the Bible) is the same for all the languages is not exploited to date.Therefore, this article proposes to add multilingual links between speech segments in different languages, and shares a large and clean dataset of 8,130 parallel spoken utterances across 8 languages (56 l…
Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University（查尔斯大学数学与物理学院）
Multilingual contextual embeddings, such as multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa, have proved useful for many multi-lingual tasks. Previous work probed the cross-linguality of the representations indirectly using zero-shot transfer learning on morphological and syntactic tasks. We instead investigate the language-neutrality of multilingual contextual embeddings directly and with respect to lexical semantics. Our results show that contextual embeddings are more language-neutral and, in general, more informative than aligned static word-type embeddings, which are explicitly trained for language neu…
