TARJAMAT: Evaluation of Bard and ChatGPT on Machine Translation of Ten Arabic Varieties

Large language models (LLMs) finetuned to follow human instructions have recently emerged as a breakthrough in AI. Models such as Google Bard and OpenAI ChatGPT, for example, are surprisingly powerful tools for question answering, code debugging, and dialogue generation. Despite the purported multilingual proficiency of these models, their linguistic inclusivity remains insufficiently explored. Considering this constraint, we present a thorough assessment of Bard and ChatGPT (encompassing both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) regarding their machine translation proficiencies across ten varieties of Arabic. Our evaluation covers diverse Arabic varieties such as Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and several nuanced dialectal variants. Furthermore, we undertake a human-centric study to scrutinize the efficacy of the most recent model, Bard, in following human instructions during translation tasks. Our exhaustive analysis indicates that LLMs may encounter challenges with certain Arabic dialects, particularly those for which minimal public data exists, such as Algerian and Mauritanian dialects. However, they exhibit satisfactory performance with more prevalent dialects, albeit occasionally trailing behind established commercial systems like Google Translate. Additionally, our analysis reveals a circumscribed capability of Bard in aligning with human instructions in translation contexts. Collectively, our findings underscore that prevailing LLMs remain far from inclusive, with only limited ability to cater for the linguistic and cultural intricacies of diverse communities.

A Thorough Review on Recent Deep Learning Methodologies for Image Captioning

Image Captioning is a task that combines computer vision and natural language processing, where it aims to generate descriptive legends for images. It is a two-fold process relying on accurate image understanding and correct language understanding both syntactically and semantically. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest research and findings in the field of image captioning due to the growing amount of knowledge available on the topic. There is not, however, enough coverage of those findings in the available review papers. We perform in this paper a run-through of the current techniques, datasets, benchmarks and evaluation metrics used in image captioning. The current research on the field is mostly focused on deep learning-based methods, where attention mechanisms along with deep reinforcement and adversarial learning appear to be in the forefront of this research topic. In this paper, we review recent methodologies such as UpDown, OSCAR, VIVO, Meta Learning and a model that uses conditional generative adversarial nets. Although the GAN-based model achieves the highest score, UpDown represents an important basis for image captioning and OSCAR and VIVO are more useful as they use novel object captioning. This review paper serves as a roadmap for researchers to keep up to date with the latest contributions made in the field of image caption generation.

Experimenting with Self-Supervision using Rotation Prediction for Image Captioning

Image captioning is a task in the field of Artificial Intelligence that merges between computer vision and natural language processing. It is responsible for generating legends that describe images, and has various applications like descriptions used by assistive technology or indexing images (for search engines for instance). This makes it a crucial topic in AI that is undergoing a lot of research. This task however, like many others, is trained on large images labeled via human annotation, which can be very cumbersome: it needs manual effort, both financial and temporal costs, it is error-prone and potentially difficult to execute in some cases (e.g. medical images). To mitigate the need for labels, we attempt to use self-supervised learning, a type of learning where models use the data contained within the images themselves as labels. It is challenging to accomplish though, since the task is two-fold: the images and captions come from two different modalities and usually handled by different types of networks. It is thus not obvious what a completely self-supervised solution would look like. How it would achieve captioning in a comparable way to how self-supervision is applied today on image recognition tasks is still an ongoing research topic. In this project, we are using an encoder-decoder architecture where the encoder is a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on OpenImages dataset and learns image features in a self-supervised fashion using the rotation pretext task. The decoder is a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and it is trained, along within the image captioning model, on MS COCO dataset and is responsible of generating captions. Our GitHub repository can be found: https://github.com/elhagry1/SSL_ImageCaptioning_RotationPrediction