United States

Large language models (LLMs) have become standard for natural language generation tasks, with instruction-tuning enhancing their capabilities. However, the lack of instruction-tuning datasets in languages other than English limits their application to diverse languages. To address this, researchers have adapted English-centric LLMs to other languages by appending English tuning data with its translated pair, from which we observe negative interference between the two. To resolve this, our contribution is identifying English as an internal pivot language, based on which we disentangle the roles of English and target language data in training. Specifically, we first design two roles as pivoted objectives, and also propose to regulate between the two, to better generalize for under-represented languages. Experiments across various languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple benchmarks. The code is publicly available for further exploration.

NAACL 2025

PROM: Pivoted and Regulated Optimization for Multilingual Instruction Learning

pivot language

less-resourced languages

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### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing approaches to multilingual text detoxification are hampered by the scarcity of parallel multilingual datasets. In this work, we introduce a pipeline for the generation of multilingual parallel detoxification data. We also introduce SynthDetoxM, a manually collected and synthetically generated multilingual parallel text detoxification dataset comprising 16,000 high-quality detoxification sentence pairs across German, French, Spanish and Russian. The data was sourced from different toxicity evaluation datasets and then rewritten with nine modern open-source LLMs in few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on the produced synthetic datasets have superior performance to those trained on the human-annotated MultiParaDetox dataset even in data limited setting. Models trained on SynthDetoxM~outperform all evaluated LLMs in few-shot setting. We release our dataset and code to help further research in multilingual text detoxification.

SynthDetoxM: Modern LLMs are Few-Shot Parallel Detoxification Data Annotators

Multimodal foundation models aim to create a unified representation space that abstracts away from surface features like language syntax or modality differences. To investigate this, we study the internal representations of three recent models, analyzing the model activations from semantically equivalent sentences across languages in the text and speech modalities. Our findings reveal that: 1) Cross-modal representations converge over model layers, except in the initial layers specialized at text and speech processing. 2) Length adaptation is crucial for reducing the cross-modal gap between text and speech, although current approaches' effectiveness is primarily limited to high-resource languages. 3) Speech exhibits larger cross-lingual differences than text. 4) For models not explicitly trained for modality-agnostic representations, the modality gap is more prominent than the language gap.

How do Multimodal Foundation Models Encode Text and Speech? An Analysis of Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Representations

Most large language models are multilingual instruction executors. Prior studies suggested that English instructions are more effective than target-language instructions even for non-English tasks; however, these studies often use datasets and instructions translated from English, which introduce biases known as translationese, hindering an unbiased comparison. To address this issue, we conduct a fair comparison between English and target-language instructions by eliminating translationese effects. Contrary to previous studies, our experiments across several tasks reveal that the advantage of adopting English instructions is not overwhelming. Additionally, we report on the features of generated texts and the instruction-following abilities when using respective instructions.

A Fair Comparison without Translationese: English vs. Target-language Instructions for Multilingual LLMs

Can we improve machine translation (MT) with LLMs by rewriting their inputs automatically? Users commonly rely on the intuition that well-written text is easier to translate when using off-the-shelf MT systems. LLMs can rewrite text in many ways but in the context of MT, these capabilities have been primarily exploited to rewrite outputs via post-editing. We present an empirical study of 21 input rewriting methods with 3 open-weight LLMs for translating from English into 6 target languages. We show that text simplification is the most effective MT-agnostic rewrite strategy and that it can be improved further when using quality estimation to assess translatability. Human evaluation further confirms that simplified rewrites and their MT outputs both largely preserve the original meaning of the source and MT. These results suggest LLM-assisted input rewriting as a promising direction for improving translations.

Automatic Input Rewriting Improves Translation with Large Language Models

Data curation for under-resource languages enables the development of more accurate and culturally sensitive natural language processing models. However, the scarcity of well-structured multilingual datasets remains a challenge for advancing machine translation in these languages, especially for African languages. This paper focuses on creating high-quality parallel corpora that capture linguistic diversity to address this gap. We introduce Bayelemabaga, the most extensive curated multilingual dataset for machine translation in the Bambara language, the vehicular language of Mali. The dataset consists of 47K Bambara-French parallel sentences curated from 231 data sources, including short stories, formal documents, and religious literature, combining modern, historical, and indigenous languages. We present our data curation process and analyze its impact on neural machine translation by fine-tuning seven commonly used transformer-based language models, i.e., MBART, MT5, M2M-100, NLLB-200, Mistral-7B, Open-Llama-7B, and Meta-Llama3-8B on Bayelemabaga. Our evaluation on four Bambara-French language pair datasets (three existing datasets and the test set of Bayelemabaga) show up to +4.5, +11.4, and +0.27 in gains, respectively, on BLEU, CHRF++, and AfriCOMET evaluation metrics. We also conducted machine and human evaluations of translations from studied models to compare the machine translation quality of encoder-decoder and decoder-only models. Our results indicate that encoder-decoder models remain the best, highlighting the importance of additional datasets to train decoder-only models.

Bayelemabaga: Creating Resources for Bambara NLP

There is increasing interest in looking at dialects in NLP. However, most work to date still treats dialects as discrete categories. For instance, evaluative work in variation-oriented NLP for English often works with Indian English or African-American Venacular English as homogeneous categories, yet even within one variety there is substantial variation. We examine within-dialect variation and show that performance critically varies within categories. We measure speech-to-text performance on Italian dialects, and empirically observe a geographical performance disparity. This disparity correlates substantially (-0.5) with linguistic similarity to the highest performing dialect variety. We cross-examine our results against dialectometry methods, and interpret the performance disparity to be due to a bias towards dialects that are more similar to the standard variety in the speech-to-text model examined. We additionally leverage geostatistical methods to predict zero-shot performance at unseen sites, and find the incorporation of geographical information to substantially improve prediction performance, indicating there to be geographical structure in the performance distribution.

Dialetto, ma Quanto Dialetto? Transcribing and Evaluating Dialects on a Continuum

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we focus on machine translation (MT), a task that has been shown to benefit from in-context translation examples. However no systematic studies have been published on how best to select examples, and mixed results have been reported on the usefulness of similarity-based selection over random selection, although these results have mainly been shown for high-resource languages only. We provide a study covering multiple LLMs and in-context example retrieval strategies. Contrarily to previously published results, we find that retrieval based on sentence embedding similarity can improve MT, especially for low-resource language directions, and we also discuss the balance between selection pool diversity and quality. Code and outputs will be made freely available.

In-Context Example Selection via Similarity Search Improves Low-Resource Machine Translation

Despite advances in the multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse tasks, English remains the dominant language for LLM research and development. So, when working with a different language, this has led to the widespread practice of pre-translation, i.e., translating the task prompt into English before inference. Selective pre-translation, a more surgical approach, focuses on translating specific prompt components. However, its current use is sporagic and lacks a systematic research foundation. Consequently, the optimal pre-translation strategy for various multilingual settings and tasks remains unclear. In this work, we aim to uncover the optimal setup for pre-translation by systematically assessing its use. Specifically, we view the prompt as a modular entity, composed of four functional parts: instruction, context, examples, and output, either of which could be translated or not. We evaluate pre-translation strategies across 35 languages covering both low and high-resource languages, on various tasks including Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Inference (NLI), Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Abstractive Summarization. Our experiments show the impact of factors as similarity to English, translation quality and the size of pre-trained data, on the model performance with pre-translation. We suggest practical guidelines for choosing optimal strategies in various multilingual settings

Beyond English: The Impact of Prompt Translation Strategies across Languages and Tasks in Multilingual LLMs

Recent studies indicate that leveraging off-the-shelf or fine-tuned retrievers, capable of retrieving relevant in-context examples tailored to the input query, enhances few-shot in-context learning of English. However, adapting these methods to other languages, especially low-resource ones, poses challenges due to the scarcity of cross-lingual retrievers and annotated data. Thus, we introduce XAMPLER: Cross-Lingual Example Retrieval, a method tailored to tackle the challenge of cross-lingual in-context learning using only annotated English data. XAMPLER first trains a retriever based on Glot500, a multilingual small language model, using positive and negative English examples constructed from the predictions of a multilingual large language model, i.e., MaLA500. Leveraging the cross-lingual capacity of the retriever, it can directly retrieve English examples as few-shot examples for in-context learning of target languages. Experiments on two multilingual text classification benchmarks, namely SIB200 with 176 languages and MasakhaNEWS with 16 languages, demonstrate that XAMPLER substantially improves the in-context learning performance across languages.

XAMPLER: Learning to Retrieve Cross-Lingual In-Context Examples

The massive amounts of web-mined parallel data often contain large amounts of noise. Semantic misalignment, as the primary source of the noise, poses a challenge for training machine translation systems. In this paper, we first introduce a process for simulating misalignment controlled by semantic similarity, which closely resembles misaligned sentences in real-world web-crawled corpora. Under our simulated misalignment noise settings, we quantitatively analyze its impact on machine translation and demonstrate the limited effectiveness of widely used pre-filters for noise detection. This underscores the necessity of more fine-grained ways to handle hard-to-detect misalignment noise. By analyzing the reliability of the model’s self-knowledge for distinguishing misaligned and clean data at the token level, we propose self-correction—an approach that gradually increases trust in the model’s self-knowledge to correct the supervision signal during training. Comprehensive experiments show that our method significantly improves translation performance both in the presence of simulated misalignment noise and when applied to real-world, noisy web-mined datasets, across a range of translation tasks.

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Next from NAACL 2025

SynthDetoxM: Modern LLMs are Few-Shot Parallel Detoxification Data Annotators

Similar lecture

PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning