EMMA-500: Enhancing Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Models

In this work, we introduce EMMA-500, a large-scale multilingual language model continue-trained on texts across 546 languages designed for enhanced multilingual performance, focusing on improving language coverage for low-resource languages. To facilitate continual pre-training, we compile the MaLA corpus, a comprehensive multilingual dataset enriched with curated datasets across diverse domains. Leveraging this corpus, we conduct extensive continual pre-training of the Llama 2 7B model, resulting in EMMA-500, which demonstrates robust performance across a wide collection of benchmarks, including a comprehensive set of multilingual tasks and PolyWrite, an open-ended generation benchmark developed in this study. Our results highlight the effectiveness of continual pre-training in expanding large language models' language capacity, particularly for underrepresented languages, demonstrating significant gains in cross-lingual transfer, task generalization, and language adaptability.

Two Stacks Are Better Than One: A Comparison of Language Modeling and Translation as Multilingual Pretraining Objectives

Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community. Establishing the best practices in pretraining has therefore become a major point of focus for much of NLP research -- especially since the insights developed for monolingual English models need not carry to more complex multilingual. One significant caveat of the current state of the art is that different works are rarely comparable: they often discuss different parameter counts, training data, and evaluation methodology. This paper proposes a comparison of multilingual pretraining objectives in a controlled methodological environment. We ensure that training data and model architectures are comparable, and discuss the downstream performances across 6 languages that we observe in probing and fine-tuning scenarios. We make two key observations: (1) the architecture dictates which pretraining objective is optimal; (2) multilingual translation is a very effective pre-training objective under the right conditions. We make our code, data, and model weights available at \texttt{\url{https://github.com/Helsinki-NLP/lm-vs-mt}}.

Can Machine Translation Bridge Multilingual Pretraining and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning?

Multilingual pretraining and fine-tuning have remarkably succeeded in various natural language processing tasks. Transferring representations from one language to another is especially crucial for cross-lingual learning. One can expect machine translation objectives to be well suited to fostering such capabilities, as they involve the explicit alignment of semantically equivalent sentences from different languages. This paper investigates the potential benefits of employing machine translation as a continued training objective to enhance language representation learning, bridging multilingual pretraining and cross-lingual applications. We study this question through two lenses: a quantitative evaluation of the performance of existing models and an analysis of their latent representations. Our results show that, contrary to expectations, machine translation as the continued training fails to enhance cross-lingual representation learning in multiple cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. We conclude that explicit sentence-level alignment in the cross-lingual scenario is detrimental to cross-lingual transfer pretraining, which has important implications for future cross-lingual transfer studies. We furthermore provide evidence through similarity measures and investigation of parameters that this lack of positive influence is due to output separability -- which we argue is of use for machine translation but detrimental elsewhere.

A New Massive Multilingual Dataset for High-Performance Language Technologies

We present the HPLT (High Performance Language Technologies) language resources, a new massive multilingual dataset including both monolingual and bilingual corpora extracted from CommonCrawl and previously unused web crawls from the Internet Archive. We describe our methods for data acquisition, management and processing of large corpora, which rely on open-source software tools and high-performance computing. Our monolingual collection focuses on low- to medium-resourced languages and covers 75 languages and a total of ~5.6 trillion word tokens de-duplicated on the document level. Our English-centric parallel corpus is derived from its monolingual counterpart and covers 18 language pairs and more than 96 million aligned sentence pairs with roughly 1.4 billion English tokens. The HPLT language resources are one of the largest open text corpora ever released, providing a great resource for language modeling and machine translation training. We publicly release the corpora, the software, and the tools used in this work.

SemEval-2024 Shared Task 6: SHROOM, a Shared-task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes

This paper presents the results of the SHROOM, a shared task focused on detecting hallucinations: outputs from natural language generation (NLG) systems that are fluent, yet inaccurate. Such cases of overgeneration put in jeopardy many NLG applications, where correctness is often mission-critical. The shared task was conducted with a newly constructed dataset of 4000 model outputs labeled by 5 annotators each, spanning 3 NLP tasks: machine translation, paraphrase generation and definition modeling. The shared task was tackled by a total of 58 different users grouped in 42 teams, out of which 27 elected to write a system description paper; collectively, they submitted over 300 prediction sets on both tracks of the shared task. We observe a number of key trends in how this approach was tackled -- many participants rely on a handful of model, and often rely either on synthetic data for fine-tuning or zero-shot prompting strategies. While a majority of the teams did outperform our proposed baseline system, the performances of top-scoring systems are still consistent with a random handling of the more challenging items.

MAMMOTH: Massively Multilingual Modular Open Translation @ Helsinki

NLP in the age of monolithic large language models is approaching its limits in terms of size and information that can be handled. The trend goes to modularization, a necessary step into the direction of designing smaller sub-networks and components with specialized functionality. In this paper, we present the MAMMOTH toolkit: a framework designed for training massively multilingual modular machine translation systems at scale, initially derived from OpenNMT-py and then adapted to ensure efficient training across computation clusters. We showcase its efficiency across clusters of A100 and V100 NVIDIA GPUs, and discuss our design philosophy and plans for future information. The toolkit is publicly available online.

MaLA-500: Massive Language Adaptation of Large Language Models

Large language models have advanced the state of the art in natural language processing. However, their predominant design for English or a limited set of languages creates a substantial gap in their effectiveness for low-resource languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce MaLA-500, a novel large language model designed to cover an extensive range of 534 languages. To train MaLA-500, we employ vocabulary extension and continued pretraining on LLaMA 2 with Glot500-c. Our experiments on SIB-200 show that MaLA-500 achieves state-of-the-art in-context learning results. We release MaLA-500 at https://huggingface.co/MaLA-LM

Domain-specific Continued Pretraining of Language Models for Capturing Long Context in Mental Health

Pretrained language models have been used in various natural language processing applications. In the mental health domain, domain-specific language models are pretrained and released, which facilitates the early detection of mental health conditions. Social posts, e.g., on Reddit, are usually long documents. However, there are no domain-specific pretrained models for long-sequence modeling in the mental health domain. This paper conducts domain-specific continued pretraining to capture the long context for mental health. Specifically, we train and release MentalXLNet and MentalLongformer based on XLNet and Longformer. We evaluate the mental health classification performance and the long-range ability of these two domain-specific pretrained models. Our models are released in HuggingFace.

Uncertainty-Aware Natural Language Inference with Stochastic Weight Averaging

This paper introduces Bayesian uncertainty modeling using Stochastic Weight Averaging-Gaussian (SWAG) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. We apply the approach to standard tasks in natural language inference (NLI) and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in terms of prediction accuracy and correlation with human annotation disagreements. We argue that the uncertainty representations in SWAG better reflect subjective interpretation and the natural variation that is also present in human language understanding. The results reveal the importance of uncertainty modeling, an often neglected aspect of neural language modeling, in NLU tasks.

Democratizing Machine Translation with OPUS-MT

This paper presents the OPUS ecosystem with a focus on the development of open machine translation models and tools, and their integration into end-user applications, development platforms and professional workflows. We discuss our on-going mission of increasing language coverage and translation quality, and also describe on-going work on the development of modular translation models and speed-optimized compact solutions for real-time translation on regular desktops and small devices.