多语言基准测试指导前沿模型的发展。然而，前沿模型报告的多语言评估结构类似于流行的推理和知识基准，但涵盖许多语言。我们证明这些基准以及相应的多语言评估衡量的是数学推理和事实记忆，而非多语言能力。例如，思考变体在这些基准上显著优于指令变体，但在真实世界的多语言任务如LMArena上表现较差。我们提出一个简单的替代方法：通过往返翻译评估多语言能力。给定源语言的文本，翻译成目标语言再翻译回原语言；原文本与结果之间的语义差距暴露了多语言生成能力的不足。往返翻译与我们基准的用户评分几乎完美相关（ρ=0.94），无需人类参考翻译，也不需要比测试模型更强大的多语言评判者。最后，我们介绍了覆盖全球广泛使用的语言的Lost in Translation（LiT）基准测试，用于更真实地评估多语言前沿模型。
英文摘要：
Multilingual benchmarks guide the development of frontier models. Yet multilingual evaluations reported by frontier models are structured similar to popular reasoning and knowledge benchmarks, but across many languages. We show such benchmarks, and consequently multilingual evaluations, measure mathematical reasoning and factual recall, not multilingual proficiency. For example, thinking variants dramatically outperform instruct variants on these benchmarks, yet often perform worse on real-world multilingual tasks, such as LMArena. We propose a simple alternative: evaluate multilingual capability via round-trip translation. Given text in a source language, translate it to a target language and back; semantic gaps between the original and result expose failures in multilingual generation capabilities. Round-trip translation correlates almost perfectly (\r{ho} = 0.94) with user ratings on LMArena with our benchmark, requires no human reference translations, and does not require a more capable multilingual judge than tested models. Lastly, we introduce Lost in Translation (LiT), a challenging round-trip translation benchmark spanning widely spoken languages worldwide, for realistic evaluation of multilingual frontier models.
NEC Laboratories Europe（NEC欧洲实验室）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is the task of extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples from natural language sentences. Current OpenIE systems extract all triple slots independently. In contrast, we explore the hypothesis that it may be beneficial to extract triple slots iteratively: first extract easy slots, followed by the difficult ones by conditioning on the easy slots, and therefore achieve a better overall extraction. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a neural OpenIE system, milIE, that operates in an iterative fashion. Due to the iterative nature, the system is also modu…
The lack of large-scale datasets has been a major hindrance to the development of NLP tasks such as spelling correction and grammatical error correction (GEC). As a complementary new resource for these tasks, we present the GitHub Typo Corpus, a large-scale, multilingual dataset of misspellings and grammatical errors along with their corrections harvested from GitHub, a large and popular platform for hosting and sharing git repositories. The dataset, which we have made publicly available, contains more than 350k edits and 65M characters in more than 15 languages, making it the largest dataset …
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）
Knowledge graph (KG) alignment and completion are usually treated as two independent tasks. While recent work has leveraged entity and relation alignments from multiple KGs, such as alignments between multilingual KGs with common entities and relations, a deeper understanding of the ways in which multilingual KG completion (MKGC) can aid the creation of multilingual KG alignments (MKGA) is still limited. Motivated by the observation that structural inconsistencies -- the main challenge for MKGA models -- can be mitigated through KG completion methods, we propose a novel model for jointly compl…
This paper presents BiPaR, a bilingual parallel novel-style machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset, developed to support multilingual and cross-lingual reading comprehension. The biggest difference between BiPaR and existing reading comprehension datasets is that each triple (Passage, Question, Answer) in BiPaR is written parallelly in two languages. We collect 3,667 bilingual parallel paragraphs from Chinese and English novels, from which we construct 14,668 parallel question-answer pairs via crowdsourced workers following a strict quality control procedure. We analyze BiPaR in depth and…
Litmus (Re)Agent: A Benchmark and Agentic System for Predictive Evaluation of Multilingual Models
Microsoft Corporation, India（微软公司（印度））；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）
Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning has shown promising results across various knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, prior methods are limited in efficient utilization of multilingual knowledge graph (KG) data for language model (LM) pretraining. They often train LMs with KGs in indirect ways, relying on extra entity/relation embeddings to facilitate knowledge injection. In this work, we explore methods to make better use of the multilingual annotation and language agnostic property of KG triples, and present novel knowledge based multilingual language models (KMLMs) trained …
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Alexandra Instituttet（亚历山德拉研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
The one-sided focus on English in previous studies of gender bias in NLP misses out on opportunities in other languages: English challenge datasets such as GAP and WinoGender highlight model preferences that are "hallucinatory", e.g., disambiguating gender-ambiguous occurrences of 'doctor' as male doctors. We show that for languages with type B reflexivization, e.g., Swedish and Russian, we can construct multi-task challenge datasets for detecting gender bias that lead to unambiguously wrong model predictions: In these languages, the direct translation of 'the doctor removed his mask' is not a…
We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph completion datasets extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patte…
Previous works mostly focus on either multilingual or multi-domain aspects of neural machine translation (NMT). This paper investigates whether the domain information can be transferred across languages on the composition of multi-domain and multilingual NMT, particularly for the incomplete data condition where in-domain bitext is missing for some language pairs. Our results in the curated leave-one-domain-out experiments show that multi-domain multilingual (MDML) NMT can boost zero-shot translation performance up to +10 gains on BLEU, as well as aid the generalisation of multi-domain NMT to t…
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Multi-source translation is an approach to exploit multiple inputs (e.g. in two different languages) to increase translation accuracy. In this paper, we examine approaches for multi-source neural machine translation (NMT) using an incomplete multilingual corpus in which some translations are missing. In practice, many multilingual corpora are not complete due to the difficulty to provide translations in all of the relevant languages (for example, in TED talks, most English talks only have subtitles for a small portion of the languages that TED supports). Existing studies on multi-source transl…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）
Entity and relation extraction is a key task in information extraction, where the output can be used for downstream NLP tasks. Existing approaches for entity and relation extraction tasks mainly focus on the English corpora and ignore other languages. Thus, it is critical to improving performance in a multilingual setting. Meanwhile, multilingual training is usually used to boost cross-lingual performance by transferring knowledge from languages (e.g., high-resource) to other (e.g., low-resource) languages. However, language interference usually exists in multilingual tasks as the model parame…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Shandong University（山东大学）
Large language models appear to learn facts from the large text corpora they are trained on. Such facts are encoded implicitly within their many parameters, making it difficult to verify or manipulate what knowledge has been learned. Language models have recently been extended to multilingual language models (MLLMs), enabling knowledge to be learned across hundreds of languages. Meanwhile, knowledge graphs contain facts in an explicit triple format, which require careful and costly curation and are only available in a few high-resource languages, restricting their research and application. To …
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are capable of translating between multiple source and target languages. Despite various approaches to train such models, they have difficulty with zero-shot translation: translating between language pairs that were not together seen during training. In this paper we first diagnose why state-of-the-art multilingual NMT models that rely purely on parameter sharing, fail to generalize to unseen language pairs. We then propose auxiliary losses on the NMT encoder that impose representational invariance across languages. Our simple approach vastl…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Amazon.com Inc（亚马逊公司）
Predicting missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) is crucial as modern KGs are far from complete. Due to labor-intensive human labeling, this phenomenon deteriorates when handling knowledge represented in various languages. In this paper, we explore multilingual KG completion, which leverages limited seed alignment as a bridge, to embrace the collective knowledge from multiple languages. However, language alignment used in prior works is still not fully exploited: (1) alignment pairs are treated equally to maximally push parallel entities to be close, which ignores KG capacity inconsistency; …
Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in low-resource languages, leading models to produce suboptimal representations. Additionally, the dependency on a fixed vocabulary limits the subword models' adaptability across languages and domains. In this work, we propose a vocabulary-free neural tokenizer by distilling segmentation information from heuristic-based subword tokenization. We pre-train our char…
Massive knowledge graphs like Wikidata attempt to capture world knowledge about multiple entities. Recent approaches concentrate on automatically enriching these KGs from text. However a lot of information present in the form of natural text in low resource languages is often missed out. Cross Lingual Information Extraction aims at extracting factual information in the form of English triples from low resource Indian Language text. Despite its massive potential, progress made on this task is lagging when compared to Monolingual Information Extraction. In this paper, we propose the task of Cros…
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…
University of Paderborn（帕德博恩大学）；Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学（UFMG））；Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学）
The RDF-to-text task has recently gained substantial attention due to continuous growth of Linked Data. In contrast to traditional pipeline models, recent studies have focused on neural models, which are now able to convert a set of RDF triples into text in an end-to-end style with promising results. However, English is the only language widely targeted. We address this research gap by presenting NABU, a multilingual graph-based neural model that verbalizes RDF data to German, Russian, and English. NABU is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, uses an encoder inspired by Graph Attention Ne…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
Prompting pre-trained language models has achieved impressive performance on various NLP tasks, especially in low data regimes. Despite the success of prompting in monolingual settings, applying prompt-based methods in multilingual scenarios has been limited to a narrow set of tasks, due to the high cost of handcrafting multilingual prompts. In this paper, we present the first work on prompt-based multilingual relation classification (RC), by introducing an efficient and effective method that constructs prompts from relation triples and involves only minimal translation for the class labels. W…
Disentangling Language Roles in Multilingual LLM Task Execution
Marquette（马凯特大学）；Cornell（康奈尔大学）；UC San Diego（南加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；UPenn（普林斯顿大学）；UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Maryland（马里兰大学）；Michigan（密歇根大学）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学香槟分校）；Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Stanford（斯坦福大学）
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Huawei Consumer Business Group（华为消费者业务集团）
Leveraging multilingual parallel texts to automatically generate paraphrases has drawn much attention as size of high-quality paraphrase corpus is limited. Round-trip translation, also known as the pivoting method, is a typical approach to this end. However, we notice that the pivoting process involves multiple machine translation models and is likely to incur semantic drift during the two-step translations. In this paper, inspired by the Transformer-based language models, we propose a simple and unified paraphrasing model, which is purely trained on multilingual parallel data and can conduct …
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）；Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) predicts missing facts in an incomplete Knowledge Graph. Almost all of existing KGC research is applicable to only one KG at a time, and in one language only. However, different language speakers may maintain separate KGs in their language and no individual KG is expected to be complete. Moreover, common entities or relations in these KGs have different surface forms and IDs, leading to ID proliferation. Entity alignment (EA) and relation alignment (RA) tasks resolve this by recognizing pairs of entity (relation) IDs in different KGs that represent the same ent…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；MMT Srl（MMT有限公司）
Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) has been extended to multilinguality, that is to handle more than one translation direction with a single system. Multilingual NMT showed competitive performance against pure bilingual systems. Notably, in low-resource settings, it proved to work effectively and efficiently, thanks to shared representation space that is forced across languages and induces a sort of transfer-learning. Furthermore, multilingual NMT enables so-called zero-shot inference across language pairs never seen at training time. Despite the increasing interest in this framework, …
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion via Efficient Multilingual Knowledge Sharing
Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学信息工程与自动化学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence（云南人工智能重点实验室）；The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（复杂系统认知与决策智能重点实验室，中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders XTREME benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization c…
University of Illinois（伊利诺伊大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
Prior studies in multilingual language modeling (e.g., Cotterell et al., 2018; Mielke et al., 2019) disagree on whether or not inflectional morphology makes languages harder to model. We attempt to resolve the disagreement and extend those studies. We compile a larger corpus of 145 Bible translations in 92 languages and a larger number of typological features. We fill in missing typological data for several languages and consider corpus-based measures of morphological complexity in addition to expert-produced typological features. We find that several morphological measures are significantly a…
