An Expanded Massive Multilingual Dataset for High-Performance Language Technologies

Training state-of-the-art large language models requires vast amounts of clean and diverse textual data. However, building suitable multilingual datasets remains a challenge. In this work, we present HPLT v2, a collection of high-quality multilingual monolingual and parallel corpora. The monolingual portion of the data contains 8T tokens covering 193 languages, while the parallel data contains 380M sentence pairs covering 51 languages. We document the entire data pipeline and release the code to reproduce it. We provide extensive analysis of the quality and characteristics of our data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of language models and machine translation systems trained on HPLT v2, demonstrating its value.

Demystifying Multilingual Chain-of-Thought in Process Reward Modeling

Large language models (LLMs) are designed to perform a wide range of tasks. To improve their ability to solve complex problems requiring multi-step reasoning, recent research leverages process reward modeling to provide fine-grained feedback at each step of the reasoning process for reinforcement learning (RL), but it predominantly focuses on English. In this paper, we tackle the critical challenge of extending process reward models (PRMs) to multilingual settings. To achieve this, we train multilingual PRMs on a dataset spanning seven languages, which is translated from English. Through comprehensive evaluations on two widely used reasoning benchmarks across 11 languages, we demonstrate that multilingual PRMs not only improve average accuracy but also reduce early-stage reasoning errors. Furthermore, our results highlight the sensitivity of multilingual PRMs to both the number of training languages and the volume of English data, while also uncovering the benefits arising from more candidate responses and trainable parameters. This work opens promising avenues for robust multilingual applications in complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. In addition, we release the code to foster research along this line.

Prepending or Cross-Attention for Speech-to-Text? An Empirical Comparison

Following the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, there is increasing interest in extending their capabilities to speech -- the most common form in communication. To integrate speech into LLMs, one promising approach is dense feature prepending (DFP) which prepends the projected speech representations to the textual representations, allowing end-to-end training with the speech encoder. However, DFP typically requires connecting a text decoder to a speech encoder. This raises questions about the importance of having a sophisticated speech encoder for DFP, and how its performance compares with a standard encoder-decoder (i.e. cross-attention) architecture. In order to perform a controlled architectural comparison, we train all models from scratch, rather than using large pretrained models, and use comparable data and parameter settings, testing speech-to-text recognition (ASR) and translation (ST) on MuST-C v1.0 and CoVoST2 datasets. We study the influence of a speech encoder in DFP. More importantly, we compare DFP and cross-attention under a variety of configurations, such as CTC compression, sequence-level knowledge distillation, generation speed and GPU memory footprint on monolingual, bilingual and multilingual models. Despite the prevalence of DFP over cross-attention, our overall results do not indicate a clear advantage of DFP.

Generics are puzzling. Can language models find the missing piece?

Generic sentences express generalisations about the world without explicit quantification. Although generics are central to everyday communication, building a precise semantic framework has proven difficult, in part because speakers use generics to generalise properties with widely different statistical prevalence. In this work, we study the implicit quantification and context-sensitivity of generics by leveraging language models as models of language. We create ConGen, a dataset of 2873 naturally occurring generic and quantified sentences in context, and define p-acceptability, a metric based on surprisal that is sensitive to quantification. Our experiments show generics are more context-sensitive than determiner quantifiers and about 20% of naturally occurring generics we analyze express weak generalisations. We also explore how human biases in stereotypes can be observed in language models.

Findings of the IWSLT 2024 Evaluation Campaign

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 18 teams whose submissions are documented in 26 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

Bridging the Language Gaps in Large Language Models with Inference-Time Cross-Lingual Intervention

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing but exhibit significant performance gaps among different languages. Most existing approaches to address these disparities rely on pretraining or fine-tuning, which are resource-intensive. To overcome these limitations without incurring significant costs, we propose Inference-Time Cross-Lingual Intervention (INCLINE), a novel framework that enhances LLM performance on low-performing (source) languages by aligning their internal representations with those of high-performing (target) languages during inference. INCLINE initially learns alignment matrices using parallel sentences from source and target languages through a Least-Squares optimization, and then applies these matrices during inference to transform the low-performing language representations toward the high-performing language space. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks with five LLMs demonstrate that INCLINE significantly improves performance across diverse tasks and languages, compared to recent strong baselines. Our analysis demonstrates that INCLINE is highly cost-effective and applicable to a wide range of applications. In addition, we release the code to foster research along this line: https://github.com/weixuan-wang123/INCLINE.

Context and System Fusion in Post-ASR Emotion Recognition with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have started to play a vital role in modelling speech and text. To explore the best use of context and multiple systems' outputs for post-ASR speech emotion prediction, we study LLM prompting on a recent task named GenSEC. Our techniques include ASR transcript ranking, variable conversation context, and system output fusion. We show that the conversation context has diminishing returns and the metric used to select the transcript for prediction is crucial. Finally, our best submission surpasses the provided baseline by 20% in absolute accuracy.

EMMA-500: Enhancing Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Models

In this work, we introduce EMMA-500, a large-scale multilingual language model continue-trained on texts across 546 languages designed for enhanced multilingual performance, focusing on improving language coverage for low-resource languages. To facilitate continual pre-training, we compile the MaLA corpus, a comprehensive multilingual dataset enriched with curated datasets across diverse domains. Leveraging this corpus, we conduct extensive continual pre-training of the Llama 2 7B model, resulting in EMMA-500, which demonstrates robust performance across a wide collection of benchmarks, including a comprehensive set of multilingual tasks and PolyWrite, an open-ended generation benchmark developed in this study. Our results highlight the effectiveness of continual pre-training in expanding large language models' language capacity, particularly for underrepresented languages, demonstrating significant gains in cross-lingual transfer, task generalization, and language adaptability.

EuroLLM: Multilingual Language Models for Europe

The quality of open-weight LLMs has seen significant improvement, yet they remain predominantly focused on English. In this paper, we introduce the EuroLLM project, aimed at developing a suite of open-weight multilingual LLMs capable of understanding and generating text in all official European Union languages, as well as several additional relevant languages. We outline the progress made to date, detailing our data collection and filtering process, the development of scaling laws, the creation of our multilingual tokenizer, and the data mix and modeling configurations. Additionally, we release our initial models: EuroLLM-1.7B and EuroLLM-1.7B-Instruct and report their performance on multilingual general benchmarks and machine translation.

Pitfalls and Outlooks in Using COMET

Since its introduction, the COMET metric has blazed a trail in the machine translation community, given its strong correlation with human judgements of translation quality. Its success stems from being a modified pre-trained multilingual model finetuned for quality assessment. However, it being a machine learning model also gives rise to a new set of pitfalls that may not be widely known. We investigate these unexpected behaviours from three aspects: 1) technical: obsolete software versions and compute precision; 2) data: empty content, language mismatch, and translationese at test time as well as distribution and domain biases in training; 3) usage and reporting: multi-reference support and model referencing in the literature. All of these problems imply that COMET scores is not comparable between papers or even technical setups and we put forward our perspective on fixing each issue. Furthermore, we release the SacreCOMET package that can generate a signature for the software and model configuration as well as an appropriate citation. The goal of this work is to help the community make more sound use of the COMET metric.