While self-attention has been instrumental in the success of Transformers, it can lead to over-concentration on a few tokens during training, resulting in suboptimal information flow. Enforcing doubly-stochastic constraints in attention matrices has been shown to improve structure and balance in attention distributions. However, existing methods rely on iterative Sinkhorn normalization, which is computationally costly. In this paper, we introduce a novel, fully parallelizable doubly-stochastic attention mechanism based on sliced optimal transport, leveraging Expected Sliced Transport Plans (ESP). Unlike prior approaches, our method enforces double stochasticity without iterative Sinkhorn normalization, significantly enhancing efficiency. To ensure differentiability, we incorporate a temperature-based soft sorting technique, enabling seamless integration into deep learning models. Experiments across multiple benchmark datasets, including image classification, point cloud classification, sentiment analysis, and neural machine translation, demonstrate that our enhanced attention regularization consistently improves performance across diverse applications.

Emergent Communication (EC) provides a unique window into the language systems that emerge autonomously when agents are trained to jointly achieve shared goals. However, it is difficult to interpret EC and evaluate its relationship with natural languages (NL). This study employs unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) techniques to decipher ECs formed during referential games with varying task complexities, influenced by the semantic diversity of the environment. Our findings demonstrate UNMT's potential to translate EC, illustrating that task complexity characterized by semantic diversity enhances EC translatability, while higher task complexity with constrained semantic variability exhibits pragmatic EC, which, although challenging to interpret, remains suitable for translation. This research marks the first attempt, to our knowledge, to translate EC without the aid of parallel data.

The growing volume of digitized historical texts requires effective semantic search using text embeddings. However, pre-trained multilingual models, typically evaluated on contemporary texts, face challenges with historical digitized content due to OCR noise and outdated spellings. We explore the use of multilingual embeddings for cross-lingual semantic search on historical Luxembourgish, a low-resource language. We collect historical Luxembourgish news articles spanning various time periods and use GPT-4o to segment and translate them into closely related languages, creating 20,000 parallel training sentences per language pair. We further create a historical bitext mining evaluation set and find that these models struggle to perform cross-lingual search on historical Luxembourgish. To address this, we propose a simple adaptation method using in-domain training data, achieving up to 98\% accuracy in cross-lingual evaluations. We release our adapted models and historical Luxembourgish-German/French bitexts to support further research.

This paper presents a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework for enhancing medical diagnosis through the integration of advanced techniques in data augmentation, feature extraction, and classification. The proposed approach employs back-translation to generate diverse paraphrased datasets, improving robustness and mitigating overfitting in classification tasks. Leveraging Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention (DeBERTa) with Dynamic Contextual Positional Gating (DCPG), the model captures fine-grained contextual and positional relationships, dynamically adjusting the influence of positional information based on semantic context to produce high-quality text embeddings. For classification, an Attention-Based Feedforward Neural Network (ABFNN) is utilized, effectively focusing on the most relevant features to improve decision-making accuracy. Applied to the classification of symptoms, clinical notes, and other medical texts, this architecture demonstrates its ability to address the complexities of medical data. The combination of data augmentation, contextual embedding generation, and advanced classification mechanisms offers a robust and accurate diagnostic tool, with potential applications in automated medical diagnosis and clinical decision support. This method demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed NLP framework for medical diagnosis, achieving remarkable results with an accuracy of 99.78%, recall of 99.72%, precision of 99.79%, and an F1-score of 99.75%. These metrics not only underscore the model's robust performance in classifying medical texts with exceptional precision and reliability but also highlight its superiority over existing methods, making it a highly promising tool for automated diagnostic systems.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) encompasses a variety of approaches, with two major types being particularly prominent: information-based, which focus on model confidence expressed as token probabilities, and consistency-based, which assess the semantic relationship between multiple outputs generated using repeated sampling. Several recent methods have combined these two approaches and shown impressive performance in various applications. However, they sometimes fail to outperform much simpler baseline methods. Our investigation reveals distinctive characteristics of LLMs as probabilistic models, which help to explain why these UQ methods underperform in certain tasks. Based on these findings, we propose a new way of synthesizing model confidence and output consistency that leads to a family of efficient and robust UQ methods. We evaluate our approach across a variety of tasks such as question answering, abstractive summarization, and machine translation, demonstrating sizable improvements over state-of-the-art UQ approaches.

As strong machine translation (MT) systems are increasingly based on large language models (LLMs), reliable quality benchmarking requires methods that capture their ability to leverage extended context. This study compares two commercial MT systems -- DeepL and Supertext -- by assessing their performance on unsegmented texts. We evaluate translation quality across four language directions with professional translators assessing segments with full document-level context. While segment-level assessments indicate no strong preference between the systems in most cases, document-level analysis reveals a preference for Supertext in three out of four language directions, suggesting superior consistency across longer texts. We advocate for more context-sensitive evaluation methodologies to ensure that MT quality assessments reflect real-world usability. We release all evaluation data and scripts for further analysis and reproduction at https://github.com/supertext/evaluation_deepl_supertext.

Previous work has considered token overlap, or even similarity of token distributions, as predictors for multilinguality and cross-lingual knowledge transfer in language models. However, these very literal metrics assign large distances to language pairs with different scripts, which can nevertheless show good cross-linguality. This limits the explanatory strength of token overlap for knowledge transfer between language pairs that use distinct scripts or follow different orthographic conventions. In this paper, we propose subword token alignability as a new way to understand the impact and quality of multilingual tokenisation. In particular, this metric predicts multilinguality much better when scripts are disparate and the overlap of literal tokens is low. We analyse this metric in the context of both encoder and decoder models, look at data size as a potential distractor, and discuss how this insight may be applied to multilingual tokenisation in future work. We recommend our subword token alignability metric for identifying optimal language pairs for cross-lingual transfer, as well as to guide the construction of better multilingual tokenisers in the future. We publish our code and reproducibility details.

Negation, a linguistic construct conveying absence, denial, or contradiction, poses significant challenges for multilingual multimodal foundation models. These models excel in tasks like machine translation, text-guided generation, image captioning, audio interactions, and video processing but often struggle to accurately interpret negation across diverse languages and cultural contexts. In this perspective paper, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of negation constructs, illustrating how structural, semantic, and cultural factors influence multimodal foundation models. We present open research questions and highlight key challenges, emphasizing the importance of addressing these issues to achieve robust negation handling. Finally, we advocate for specialized benchmarks, language-specific tokenization, fine-grained attention mechanisms, and advanced multimodal architectures. These strategies can foster more adaptable and semantically precise multimodal foundation models, better equipped to navigate and accurately interpret the complexities of negation in multilingual, multimodal environments.

A cascade-based speech-to-speech translation has been considered a benchmark for a very long time, but it is plagued by many issues, like the time taken to translate a speech from one language to another and compound errors. These issues are because a cascade-based method uses a combination of methods such as speech recognition, speech-to-text translation, and finally, text-to-speech translation. Translatotron, a sequence-to-sequence direct speech-to-speech translation model was designed by Google to address the issues of compound errors associated with cascade model. Today there are 3 versions of the Translatotron model: Translatotron 1, Translatotron 2, and Translatotron3. The first version was designed as a proof of concept to show that a direct speech-to-speech translation was possible, it was found to be less effective than the cascade model but was producing promising results. Translatotron2 was an improved version of Translatotron 1 with results similar to the cascade model. Translatotron 3 the latest version of the model is better than the cascade model at some points. In this paper, a complete review of speech-to-speech translation will be presented, with a particular focus on all the versions of Translatotron models. We will also show that Translatotron is the best model to bridge the language gap between African Languages and other well-formalized languages.

Cross-language learning allows one to use training data from one language to build models for a different language. Many approaches to bilingual learning require that we have word-level alignment of sentences from parallel corpora. In this work we explore the use of autoencoder-based methods for cross-language learning of vectorial word representations that are coherent between two languages, while not relying on word-level alignments. We show that by simply learning to reconstruct the bag-of-words representations of aligned sentences, within and between languages, we can in fact learn high-quality representations and do without word alignments. We empirically investigate the success of our approach on the problem of cross-language text classification, where a classifier trained on a given language (e.g., English) must learn to generalize to a different language (e.g., German). In experiments on 3 language pairs, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming a method exploiting word alignments and a strong machine translation baseline.