DUnE: Dataset for Unified Editing

Even the most advanced language models remain susceptible to errors necessitating to modify these models without initiating a comprehensive retraining process. Model editing refers to the modification of a model's knowledge or representations in a manner that produces the desired outcomes. Prior research primarily centered around editing factual data e.g. "Messi plays for Inter Miami" confining the definition of an edit to a knowledge triplet i.e. (subject, object, relation). However, as the applications of language models expand, so do the diverse ways in which we wish to edit and refine their outputs. In this study, we broaden the scope of the editing problem to include an array of editing cases such as debiasing and rectifying reasoning errors and define an edit as any natural language expression that solicits a change in the model's outputs. We are introducing DUnE-an editing benchmark where edits are natural language sentences and propose that DUnE presents a challenging yet relevant task. To substantiate this claim, we conduct an extensive series of experiments testing various editing approaches to address DUnE, demonstrating their respective strengths and weaknesses. We show that retrieval-augmented language modeling can outperform specialized editing techniques and neither set of approaches has fully solved the generalized editing problem covered by our benchmark.

Low-Resource Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: Leveraging Comparable Data, Code-Switching and Compute Resources

We conduct an empirical study of unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) for truly low resource languages, exploring the case when both parallel training data and compute resource are lacking, reflecting the reality of most of the world's languages and the researchers working on these languages. We propose a simple and scalable method to improve unsupervised NMT, showing how adding comparable data mined using a bilingual dictionary along with modest additional compute resource to train the model can significantly improve its performance. We also demonstrate how the use of the dictionary to code-switch monolingual data to create more comparable data can further improve performance. With this weak supervision, our best method achieves BLEU scores that improve over supervised results for English$\rightarrow$Gujarati (+18.88), English$\rightarrow$Kazakh (+5.84), and English$\rightarrow$Somali (+1.16), showing the promise of weakly-supervised NMT for many low resource languages with modest compute resource in the world. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to quantitatively showcase the impact of different modest compute resource in low resource NMT.