This research investigates the effectiveness of ChatGPT, an AI language model by OpenAI, in translating English into Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada languages, aimed at assisting tourists in India's linguistically diverse environment. To measure the translation quality, a test set of 50 questions from diverse fields such as general knowledge, food, and travel was used. These were assessed by five volunteers for accuracy and fluency, and the scores were subsequently converted into a BLEU score. The BLEU score evaluates the closeness of a machine-generated translation to a human translation, with a higher score indicating better translation quality. The Hindi translations outperformed others, showcasing superior accuracy and fluency, whereas Telugu translations lagged behind. Human evaluators rated both the accuracy and fluency of translations, offering a comprehensive perspective on the language model's performance.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an intricate and demanding task that integrates natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), capturing the interest of researchers. The English language, renowned for its wealth of resources, has witnessed notable advancements in both datasets and models designed for VQA. However, there is a lack of models that target specific countries such as Vietnam. To address this limitation, we introduce a transformer-based Vietnamese model named BARTPhoBEiT. This model includes pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence and bidirectional encoder representation from Image Transformers in Vietnamese and evaluates Vietnamese VQA datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the strong baseline and improves the state-of-the-art in six metrics: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-score, WUPS 0.0, and WUPS 0.9.

In this paper, we present the first automatic lexical simplification system for the Turkish language. Recent text simplification efforts rely on manually crafted simplified corpora and comprehensive NLP tools that can analyse the target text both in word and sentence levels. Turkish is a morphologically rich agglutinative language that requires unique considerations such as the proper handling of inflectional cases. Being a low-resource language in terms of available resources and industrial-strength tools, it makes the text simplification task harder to approach. We present a new text simplification pipeline based on pretrained representation model BERT together with morphological features to generate grammatically correct and semantically appropriate word-level simplifications.

Lexical simplification (LS) methods based on pretrained language models have made remarkable progress, generating potential substitutes for a complex word through analysis of its contextual surroundings. However, these methods require separate pretrained models for different languages and disregard the preservation of sentence meaning. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual LS method via paraphrase generation, as paraphrases provide diversity in word selection while preserving the sentence's meaning. We regard paraphrasing as a zero-shot translation task within multilingual neural machine translation that supports hundreds of languages. After feeding the input sentence into the encoder of paraphrase modeling, we generate the substitutes based on a novel decoding strategy that concentrates solely on the lexical variations of the complex word. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses BERT-based methods and zero-shot GPT3-based method significantly on English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a small one. It has gained increasing attention in the natural language processing community, driven by the demands of compressing ever-growing language models. In this work, we propose an f-DISTILL framework, which formulates sequence-level knowledge distillation as minimizing a generalized f-divergence function. We propose four distilling variants under our framework and show that existing SeqKD and ENGINE approaches are approximations of our f-DISTILL methods. We further derive step-wise decomposition for our f-DISTILL, reducing intractable sequence-level divergence to word-level losses that can be computed in a tractable manner. Experiments across four datasets show that our methods outperform existing KD approaches, and that our symmetric distilling losses can better force the student to learn from the teacher distribution.

Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in a Transformer's multi-head attention mechanism can be safely pruned away without significantly harming the performance of the model; such pruning leads to models that are noticeably smaller and faster in practice. Our work introduces a new head pruning technique that we term differentiable subset pruning. Intuitively, our method learns per-head importance variables and then enforces a user-specified hard constraint on the number of unpruned heads. The importance variables are learned via stochastic gradient descent. We conduct experiments on natural language inference and machine translation; we show that differentiable subset pruning performs comparably or better than previous works while offering precise control of the sparsity level.

Training stability is of great importance to Transformers. In this work, we investigate the training dynamics of Transformers by examining the evolution of the attention layers. In particular, we track the attention entropy for each attention head during the course of training, which is a proxy for model sharpness. We identify a common pattern across different architectures and tasks, where low attention entropy is accompanied by high training instability, which can take the form of oscillating loss or divergence. We denote the pathologically low attention entropy, corresponding to highly concentrated attention scores, as $\textit{entropy collapse}$. As a remedy, we propose $\sigma$Reparam, a simple and efficient solution where we reparametrize all linear layers with spectral normalization and an additional learned scalar. We demonstrate that $\sigma$Reparam successfully prevents entropy collapse in the attention layers, promoting more stable training. Additionally, we prove a tight lower bound of the attention entropy, which decreases exponentially fast with the spectral norm of the attention logits, providing additional motivation for our approach. We conduct experiments with $\sigma$Reparam on image classification, image self-supervised learning, machine translation, speech recognition, and language modeling tasks. We show that $\sigma$Reparam provides stability and robustness with respect to the choice of hyperparameters, going so far as enabling training (a) a Vision Transformer {to competitive performance} without warmup, weight decay, layer normalization or adaptive optimizers; (b) deep architectures in machine translation and (c) speech recognition to competitive performance without warmup and adaptive optimizers. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/apple/ml-sigma-reparam}.

It is a well-known fact that current AI-based language technology -- language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries and corpora -- focuses on the world's 2-3% most widely spoken languages. Recent research efforts have attempted to expand the coverage of AI technology to `under-resourced languages.' The goal of our paper is to bring attention to a phenomenon that we call linguistic bias: multilingual language processing systems often exhibit a hardwired, yet usually involuntary and hidden representational preference towards certain languages. Linguistic bias is manifested in uneven per-language performance even in the case of similar test conditions. We show that biased technology is often the result of research and development methodologies that do not do justice to the complexity of the languages being represented, and that can even become ethically problematic as they disregard valuable aspects of diversity as well as the needs of the language communities themselves. As our attempt at building diversity-aware language resources, we present a new initiative that aims at reducing linguistic bias through both technological design and methodology, based on an eye-level collaboration with local communities.

It is well known that AI-based language technology -- large language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries, and corpora -- is currently limited to 2 to 3 percent of the world's most widely spoken and/or financially and politically best supported languages. In response, recent research efforts have sought to extend the reach of AI technology to ``underserved languages.'' In this paper, we show that many of these attempts produce flawed solutions that adhere to a hard-wired representational preference for certain languages, which we call techno-linguistic bias. Techno-linguistic bias is distinct from the well-established phenomenon of linguistic bias as it does not concern the languages represented but rather the design of the technologies. As we show through the paper, techno-linguistic bias can result in systems that can only express concepts that are part of the language and culture of dominant powers, unable to correctly represent concepts from other communities. We argue that at the root of this problem lies a systematic tendency of technology developer communities to apply a simplistic understanding of diversity which does not do justice to the more profound differences that languages, and ultimately the communities that speak them, embody. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, we point to the broader sociopolitical consequences of the bias we identify and show how it can lead not only to a disregard for valuable aspects of diversity but also to an under-representation of the needs and diverse worldviews of marginalized language communities.

Automatic subtitling is the task of automatically translating the speech of audiovisual content into short pieces of timed text, i.e. subtitles and their corresponding timestamps. The generated subtitles need to conform to space and time requirements, while being synchronised with the speech and segmented in a way that facilitates comprehension. Given its considerable complexity, the task has so far been addressed through a pipeline of components that separately deal with transcribing, translating, and segmenting text into subtitles, as well as predicting timestamps. In this paper, we propose the first direct ST model for automatic subtitling that generates subtitles in the target language along with their timestamps with a single model. Our experiments on 7 language pairs show that our approach outperforms a cascade system in the same data condition, also being competitive with production tools on both in-domain and newly-released out-domain benchmarks covering new scenarios.