In November, a young man named Noland Arbaugh announced he'd be livestreaming from his home for three days straight. His broadcast was in some ways typical fare: a backyard tour, video games, meet mom. The difference is that Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, has thin electrode-studded wires installed in his brain, which he used to move a computer mouse on a screen, click menus, and play chess. The implant, called N1, was installed last year by neurosurgeons working with Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-interface company. Arbaugh's livestream is an indicator that Neuralink is a whole lot closer to creating a plug-and-play experience that can restore people's daily ability to roam the web and play games, giving them what the company has called "digital freedom." But this is not yet a commercial product.

In this paper, we elaborate on how AI can support diversity and inclusion and exemplify research projects conducted in that direction. We start by looking at the challenges and progress in making large language models (LLMs) more transparent, inclusive, and aware of social biases. Even though LLMs like ChatGPT have impressive abilities, they struggle to understand different cultural contexts and engage in meaningful, human like conversations. A key issue is that biases in language processing, especially in machine translation, can reinforce inequality. Tackling these biases requires a multidisciplinary approach to ensure AI promotes diversity, fairness, and inclusion. We also highlight AI's role in identifying biased content in media, which is important for improving representation. By detecting unequal portrayals of social groups, AI can help challenge stereotypes and create more inclusive technologies. Transparent AI algorithms, which clearly explain their decisions, are essential for building trust and reducing bias in AI systems. We also stress AI systems need diverse and inclusive training data. Projects like the Child Growth Monitor show how using a wide range of data can help address real world problems like malnutrition and poverty. We present a project that demonstrates how AI can be applied to monitor the role of search engines in spreading disinformation about the LGBTQ+ community. Moreover, we discuss the SignON project as an example of how technology can bridge communication gaps between hearing and deaf people, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and mutual trust in developing inclusive AI. Overall, with this paper, we advocate for AI systems that are not only effective but also socially responsible, promoting fair and inclusive interactions between humans and machines.

Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a single discourse, presents a significant challenge for Automatic Speech Recognition. Despite the unique nature of the task, performance is commonly measured with established metrics such as Word-Error-Rate (WER). However, in this paper, we question whether these general metrics accurately assess performance on code-switching. Specifically, using both Connectionist-Temporal-Classification and Encoder-Decoder models, we show fine-tuning on non-code-switched data from both matrix and embedded language improves classical metrics on code-switching test sets, although actual code-switched words worsen (as expected). Therefore, we propose Point-of-Interest Error Rate (PIER), a variant of WER that focuses only on specific words of interest. We instantiate PIER on code-switched utterances and show that this more accurately describes the code-switching performance, showing huge room for improvement in future work. This focused evaluation allows for a more precise assessment of model performance, particularly in challenging aspects such as inter-word and intra-word code-switching.

This paper addresses the challenges translating case law under Hong Kong's bilingual legal system. It highlights the initial success of translating all written statutes into Chinese before the 1997 handover, a task mandated by the Basic Law. The effort involved significant collaboration among legal, linguistic, and translation experts, resulting in a comprehensive and culturally appropriate bilingual legal system. However, translating case law remains a significant challenge due to the sheer volume and continuous growth of judicial decisions. The paper critiques the governments and judiciarys sporadic and uncoordinated efforts to translate case law, contrasting it with the thorough approach previously taken for statute translation. Although the government acknowledges the importance of legal bilingualism, it lacks a sustainable strategy for translating case law. The Judiciarys position that translating all judgments is unnecessary, unrealistic, and not cost-effectiveis analyzed and critiqued for its impact on legal transparency and public trust. A proposed solution involves leveraging machine translation technology through a human-machine interactive translation platform, which undergoes two major transitions. Initially based on a neural model, the platform transitions to using a large language model for improved translation accuracy. Furthermore, it evolves from a single-agent system to a multi-agent system, incorporating Translator, Annotator, and Proofreader agents. This multi-agent approach, supported by a grant, aims to facilitate efficient, high-quality translation of judicial judgments by integrating advanced artificial intelligence and continuous feedback mechanisms, thus better meeting the needs of a bilingual legal system.

Gender-neutral language reflects societal and linguistic shifts towards greater inclusivity by avoiding the implication that one gender is the norm over others. This is particularly relevant for grammatical gender languages, which heavily encode the gender of terms for human referents and over-relies on masculine forms, even when gender is unspecified or irrelevant. Language technologies are known to mirror these inequalities, being affected by a male bias and perpetuating stereotypical associations when translating into languages with extensive gendered morphology. In such cases, gender-neutral language can help avoid undue binary assumptions. However, despite its importance for creating fairer multi- and cross-lingual technologies, inclusive language research remains scarce and insufficiently supported in current resources. To address this gap, we present the multilingual mGeNTe dataset. Derived from the bilingual GeNTE (Piergentili et al., 2023), mGeNTE extends the original corpus to include the English-Italian/German/Spanish language pairs. Since each language pair is English-aligned with gendered and neutral sentences in the target languages, mGeNTE enables research in both automatic Gender-Neutral Translation (GNT) and language modelling for three grammatical gender languages.

Configuration translation is a critical and frequent task in network operations. When a network device is damaged or outdated, administrators need to replace it to maintain service continuity. The replacement devices may originate from different vendors, necessitating configuration translation to ensure seamless network operation. However, translating configurations manually is a labor-intensive and error-prone process. In this paper, we propose an intent-based framework for translating network configuration with Large Language Model (LLM) Agents. The core of our approach is an Intent-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (IRAG) module that systematically splits a configuration file into fragments, extracts intents, and generates accurate translations. We also design a two-stage verification method to validate the syntax and semantics correctness of the translated configurations. We implement and evaluate the proposed method on real-world network configurations. Experimental results show that our method achieves 97.74% syntax correctness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in translation accuracy.

This paper presents an results of the VLSP 2022-2023 Machine Translation Shared Tasks, focusing on Vietnamese-Chinese and Vietnamese-Lao machine translation. The tasks were organized as part of the 9th, 10th annual workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022, VLSP 2023). The objective of the shared task was to build machine translation systems, specifically targeting Vietnamese-Chinese and Vietnamese-Lao translation (corresponding to 4 translation directions). The submission were evaluated on 1,000 pairs for testing (news and general domains) using established metrics like BLEU [11] and SacreBLEU [12]. Additionally, system outputs also were evaluated with human judgment provided by experts in Chinese and Lao languages. These human assessments played a crucial role in ranking the performance of the machine translation models, ensuring a more comprehensive evaluation.

The paper overviews the shared task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages. It focuses on the reverse transliteration of low-resourced languages in the Indo-Aryan family to their native scripts. Typing Romanized Indo-Aryan languages using ad-hoc transliterals and achieving accurate native scripts are complex and often inaccurate processes with the current keyboard systems. This task aims to introduce and evaluate a real-time reverse transliterator that converts Romanized Indo-Aryan languages to their native scripts, improving the typing experience for users. Out of 11 registered teams, four teams participated in the final evaluation phase with transliteration models for Sinhala, Hindi and Malayalam. These proposed solutions not only solve the issue of ad-hoc transliteration but also empower low-resource language usability in the digital arena.

The development of neural sequence models, such as Transformers [Vaswani et al., 2017], along with the improvements in large-scale self-supervised learning, has opened the door to universal language understanding and generation. This achievement is largely motivated by pre-training: we separate common components from many neural network-based systems, and then train them on huge amounts of unlabeled data using self-supervision. These pre-trained models serve as foundation models that can be easily adapted to different tasks via fine-tuning or prompting. As a result, the paradigm of NLP has been enormously changed. In many cases, large-scale supervised learning for specific tasks is no longer required, and instead, we only need to adapt pre-trained foundation models.

This paper presents a multi-way parallel English-Tamil-Sinhala corpus annotated with Named Entities (NEs), where Sinhala and Tamil are low-resource languages. Using pre-trained multilingual Language Models (mLMs), we establish new benchmark Named Entity Recognition (NER) results on this dataset for Sinhala and Tamil. We also carry out a detailed investigation on the NER capabilities of different types of mLMs. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our NER system on a low-resource Neural Machine Translation (NMT) task. Our dataset is publicly released: https://github.com/suralk/multiNER.