Manning, Christopher
BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language
Murty, Shikhar, Manning, Christopher, Shaw, Peter, Joshi, Mandar, Lee, Kenton
Following natural language instructions by executing actions in digital environments (e.g. web-browsers and REST APIs) is a challenging task for language model (LM) agents. Unfortunately, LM agents often fail to generalize to new environments without human demonstrations. This work presents BAGEL, a method for bootstrapping LM agents without human supervision. BAGEL converts a seed set of randomly explored trajectories or synthetic instructions, into demonstrations, via round-trips between two noisy LM components: an LM labeler which converts a trajectory into a synthetic instruction, and a zero-shot LM agent which maps the synthetic instruction into a refined trajectory. By performing these round-trips iteratively, BAGEL quickly converts the initial distribution of trajectories towards those that are well-described by natural language. We use BAGEL demonstrations to adapt a zero shot LM agent at test time via in-context learning over retrieved demonstrations, and find improvements of over 2-13% absolute on ToolQA and MiniWob++, with up to 13x reduction in execution failures.
FLawN-T5: An Empirical Examination of Effective Instruction-Tuning Data Mixtures for Legal Reasoning
Niklaus, Joel, Zheng, Lucia, McCarthy, Arya D., Hahn, Christopher, Rosen, Brian M., Henderson, Peter, Ho, Daniel E., Honke, Garrett, Liang, Percy, Manning, Christopher
Instruction tuning is an important step in making language models useful for direct user interaction. However, many legal tasks remain out of reach for most open LLMs and there do not yet exist any large scale instruction datasets for the domain. This critically limits research in this application area. In this work, we curate LawInstruct, a large legal instruction dataset, covering 17 jurisdictions, 24 languages and a total of 12M examples. We present evidence that domain-specific pretraining and instruction tuning improve performance on LegalBench, including improving Flan-T5 XL by 8 points or 16\% over the baseline. However, the effect does not generalize across all tasks, training regimes, model sizes, and other factors. LawInstruct is a resource for accelerating the development of models with stronger information processing and decision making capabilities in the legal domain.
Machine Translation for Nko: Tools, Corpora and Baseline Results
Doumbouya, Moussa Koulako Bala, Diané, Baba Mamadi, Cissé, Solo Farabado, Diané, Djibrila, Sow, Abdoulaye, Doumbouya, Séré Moussa, Bangoura, Daouda, Bayo, Fodé Moriba, Condé, Ibrahima Sory 2., Diané, Kalo Mory, Piech, Chris, Manning, Christopher
Unfortunately, to over 40 million people across West African countries date, there isn't any usable machine translation including Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Gambia, (MT) system for Nko, in part due to the unavailability Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Liberia, and of large text corpora required by state-of-the-art Guinea-Bissau. Nko, which means'I say' in all neural machine translation (NMT) algorithms. Manding languages, was developed as both the Nko is a representative case study of the broader Manding literary standard language and a writing issues that interfere with the goal of universal machine system by Soulemana Kanté in 1949 for the translation. Thousands of languages still purpose of sustaining the strong oral tradition of don't have available or usable MT systems, mainly Manding languages (Niane, 1974; Conde, 2017; due to the unavailability of high-quality parallel Eberhard et al., 2023).
JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset
Armstrong, Ruth-Ann, Hewitt, John, Manning, Christopher
JamPatoisNLI provides the first dataset for natural language inference in a creole language, Jamaican Patois. Many of the most-spoken low-resource languages are creoles. These languages commonly have a lexicon derived from a major world language and a distinctive grammar reflecting the languages of the original speakers and the process of language birth by creolization. This gives them a distinctive place in exploring the effectiveness of transfer from large monolingual or multilingual pretrained models. While our work, along with previous work, shows that transfer from these models to low-resource languages that are unrelated to languages in their training set is not very effective, we would expect stronger results from transfer to creoles. Indeed, our experiments show considerably better results from few-shot learning of JamPatoisNLI than for such unrelated languages, and help us begin to understand how the unique relationship between creoles and their high-resource base languages affect cross-lingual transfer. JamPatoisNLI, which consists of naturally-occurring premises and expert-written hypotheses, is a step towards steering research into a traditionally underserved language and a useful benchmark for understanding cross-lingual NLP.