Insufficient modeling of human preferences within the reward model is a major obstacle for leveraging human feedback to improve translation quality. Fortunately, quality estimation (QE), which predicts the quality of a given translation without reference, has achieved impressive alignment with human evaluations in the last two years. In this work, we investigate the potential of employing the QE model as the reward model (the QE-based reward model) to predict human preferences for feedback training. We first identify the overoptimization problem during QE-based feedback training, manifested as an increase in reward while translation quality declines. We examine the problem and argue that the vulnerability of the QE model might lead to high rewards for incorrect translations, resulting in overoptimization and error propagation. To address the problem, we adopt a simple yet effective method that uses heuristic rules to detect the incorrect translations and assigns a penalty term to the QE-based rewards for the detected incorrect translations. Experimental results show that the proposed QE-based feedback training achieves consistent and significant improvements across various settings, further verified through human preference studies. Our subsequent analysis demonstrates the high data efficiency of the proposed QE-based feedback training: the proposed approach using a small amount of monolingual data can outperform systems using larger parallel corpora.

Zero-shot translation is an open problem, aiming to translate between language pairs unseen during training in Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT). A common, albeit resource-consuming, solution is to mine as many translation directions as possible to add to the parallel corpus. In this paper, we show that the zero-shot capability of an English-centric model can be easily enhanced by fine-tuning with a very small amount of multi-parallel data. For example, on the EC30 dataset, we show that up to +21.7 ChrF non-English overall improvements (870 directions) can be achieved by using only 100 multi-parallel samples, meanwhile preserving capability in English-centric directions. We further study the size effect of fine-tuning data and its transfer capabilities. Surprisingly, our empirical analysis shows that comparable overall improvements can be achieved even through fine-tuning in a small, randomly sampled direction set (10\%). Also, the resulting non-English performance is quite close to the upper bound (complete translation). Due to its high efficiency and practicality, we encourage the community 1) to consider the use of the fine-tuning method as a strong baseline for zero-shot translation and 2) to construct more comprehensive and high-quality multi-parallel data to cover real-world demand.

This study proposes a novel method to understand the factors affecting individuals' perception of transport accessibility, socioeconomic disparity, and public infrastructure. As opposed to the time consuming and expensive survey-based approach, this method can generate organic large-scale responses from social media and develop statistical models to understand individuals' perceptions of various transportation issues. This study retrieved and analyzed 36,098 tweets from New York City from March 19, 2020, to May 15, 2022. A state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithm is used for text mining and classification. A data fusion technique has been adopted to generate a series of socioeconomic traits that are used as explanatory variables in the model. The model results show that females and individuals of Asian origin tend to discuss transportation accessibility more than their counterparts, with those experiencing high neighborhood traffic also being more vocal. However, disadvantaged individuals, including the unemployed and those living in low-income neighborhoods or in areas with high natural hazard risks, tend to communicate less about such issues. As for socioeconomic disparity, individuals of Asian origin and those experiencing various types of air pollution are more likely to discuss these topics on Twitter, often with a negative sentiment. However, unemployed, or disadvantaged individuals, as well as those living in areas with high natural hazard risks or expected losses, are less inclined to tweet about this subject. Lack of internet accessibility could be a reason why many disadvantaged individuals do not tweet about transport accessibility and subsidized internet could be a possible solution.

Using a vocabulary that is shared across languages is common practice in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). In addition to its simple design, shared tokens play an important role in positive knowledge transfer, assuming that shared tokens refer to similar meanings across languages. However, when word overlap is small, especially due to different writing systems, transfer is inhibited. In this paper, we define word-level information transfer pathways via word equivalence classes and rely on graph networks to fuse word embeddings across languages. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of our approach: 1) embeddings of words with similar meanings are better aligned across languages, 2) our method achieves consistent BLEU improvements of up to 2.3 points for high- and low-resource MNMT, and 3) less than 1.0\% additional trainable parameters are required with a limited increase in computational costs, while inference time remains identical to the baseline. We release the codebase to the community.

Recent advancements in large language models have facilitated the execution of complex language tasks, not only in English but also in non-English languages. However, the tokenizers of most language models, such as Llama, trained on English-centric corpora, tend to excessively fragment tokens in non-English languages. This issue is especially pronounced in non-roman alphabetic languages, which are often divided at a character or even Unicode level, leading to slower text generation. To address this, our study introduces a novel framework designed to expedite text generation in these languages. This framework predicts larger linguistic units than those of conventional multilingual tokenizers and is specifically tailored to the target language, thereby reducing the number of decoding steps required. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed framework increases the generation speed by a factor of 1.9 compared to standard decoding while maintaining the performance of a pre-trained multilingual model on monolingual tasks.

This chapter examines the role of Machine Translation in perpetuating gender bias, highlighting the challenges posed by cross-linguistic settings and statistical dependencies. A comprehensive overview of relevant existing work related to gender bias in both conventional Neural Machine Translation approaches and Generative Pretrained Transformer models employed as Machine Translation systems is provided. Through an experiment using ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) in an English-Italian translation context, we further assess ChatGPT's current capacity to address gender bias. The findings emphasize the ongoing need for advancements in mitigating bias in Machine Translation systems and underscore the importance of fostering fairness and inclusivity in language technologies.

ChatGPT, as a language model based on large-scale pre-training, has exerted a profound influence on the domain of machine translation. In ChatGPT, a "Prompt" refers to a segment of text or instruction employed to steer the model towards generating a specific category of response. The design of the translation prompt emerges as a key aspect that can wield influence over factors such as the style, precision and accuracy of the translation to a certain extent. However, there is a lack of a common standard and methodology on how to design and select a translation prompt. Accordingly, this paper proposes a generic taxonomy, which defines gradable translation prompts in terms of expression type, translation style, POS information and explicit statement, thus facilitating the construction of prompts endowed with distinct attributes tailored for various translation tasks. Specific experiments and cases are selected to validate and illustrate the effectiveness of the method.

Although there has been significant advancement in the field of speech-to-speech translation, conventional models still require language-parallel speech data between the source and target languages for training. In this paper, we introduce TranSentence, a novel speech-to-speech translation without language-parallel speech data. To achieve this, we first adopt a language-agnostic sentence-level speech encoding that captures the semantic information of speech, irrespective of language. We then train our model to generate speech based on the encoded embedding obtained from a language-agnostic sentence-level speech encoder that is pre-trained with various languages. With this method, despite training exclusively on the target language's monolingual data, we can generate target language speech in the inference stage using language-agnostic speech embedding from the source language speech. Furthermore, we extend TranSentence to multilingual speech-to-speech translation. The experimental results demonstrate that TranSentence is superior to other models.

The Curriculum Recommendations paradigm is dedicated to fostering learning equality within the ever-evolving realms of educational technology and curriculum development. In acknowledging the inherent obstacles posed by existing methodologies, such as content conflicts and disruptions from language translation, this paradigm aims to confront and overcome these challenges. Notably, it addresses content conflicts and disruptions introduced by language translation, hindrances that can impede the creation of an all-encompassing and personalized learning experience. The paradigm's objective is to cultivate an educational environment that not only embraces diversity but also customizes learning experiences to suit the distinct needs of each learner. To overcome these challenges, our approach builds upon notable contributions in curriculum development and personalized learning, introducing three key innovations. These include the integration of Transformer Base Model to enhance computational efficiency, the implementation of InfoNCE Loss for accurate content-topic matching, and the adoption of a language switching strategy to alleviate translation-related ambiguities. Together, these innovations aim to collectively tackle inherent challenges and contribute to forging a more equitable and effective learning journey for a diverse range of learners. Competitive cross-validation scores underscore the efficacy of sentence-transformers/LaBSE, achieving 0.66314, showcasing our methodology's effectiveness in diverse linguistic nuances for content alignment prediction. Index Terms-Curriculum Recommendation, Transformer model with InfoNCE Loss, Language Switching.

This paper introduces ClimateGPT, a model family of domain-specific large language models that synthesize interdisciplinary research on climate change. We trained two 7B models from scratch on a science-oriented dataset of 300B tokens. For the first model, the 4.2B domain-specific tokens were included during pre-training and the second was adapted to the climate domain after pre-training. Additionally, ClimateGPT-7B, 13B and 70B are continuously pre-trained from Llama~2 on a domain-specific dataset of 4.2B tokens. Each model is instruction fine-tuned on a high-quality and human-generated domain-specific dataset that has been created in close cooperation with climate scientists. To reduce the number of hallucinations, we optimize the model for retrieval augmentation and propose a hierarchical retrieval strategy. To increase the accessibility of our model to non-English speakers, we propose to make use of cascaded machine translation and show that this approach can perform comparably to natively multilingual models while being easier to scale to a large number of languages. Further, to address the intrinsic interdisciplinary aspect of climate change we consider different research perspectives. Therefore, the model can produce in-depth answers focusing on different perspectives in addition to an overall answer. We propose a suite of automatic climate-specific benchmarks to evaluate LLMs. On these benchmarks, ClimateGPT-7B performs on par with the ten times larger Llama-2-70B Chat model while not degrading results on general domain benchmarks. Our human evaluation confirms the trends we saw in our benchmarks. All models were trained and evaluated using renewable energy and are released publicly.