United States

Annually, research teams spend large amounts of money to evaluate the quality of machine translation systems (WMT, inter alia). This is expensive because it requires a lot of expert human labor. In the recently adopted annotation protocol, Error Span Annotation (ESA), annotators mark erroneous parts of the translation and then assign a final score. A lot of the annotator time is spent on scanning the translation for possible errors. In our work, we help the annotators by pre-filling the error annotations with recall-oriented automatic quality estimation. With this AI assistance,
we obtain annotations at the same quality level while cutting down the time per span annotation by half (71s/error span → 31s/error span). The biggest advantage of the ESAAI protocol is an accurate priming of annotators (pre-filled error spans) before they assign the final score. This alleviates a potential automation bias, which we confirm to be low. In our experiments, we find that the annotation budget can be further reduced by almost 25% with filtering of examples that the AI deems to be likely to be correct.

NAACL 2025

AI-Assisted Human Evaluation of Machine Translation

error span annotation

human evaluation

machine translation

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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

While broad-coverage multilingual natural language processing tools have been developed, a significant portion of the world's over 7000 languages are still neglected. One reason is the lack of evaluation datasets that cover a diverse range of languages, particularly those that are low-resource or endangered. To address this gap, we present a large-scale text classification dataset encompassing 1504 languages many of which have otherwise limited or no annotated data. This dataset is constructed using parallel translations of the Bible. We develop relevant topics, annotate the English data through crowdsourcing and project these annotations onto other languages via aligned verses. We benchmark a range of existing multilingual models on this dataset. We make our dataset and code available to the public.

Taxi1500: A Dataset for Multilingual Text Classification in 1500 Languages

Collecting instruction fine-tuning (IFT) data is a resource and time intensive task especially in multilingual setting where finding proficient native speakers is challenging. Moreover, traditional data collection is prone to privacy risks, toxicity and lacks scalability. While, fully synthetic datasets are a promising alternative, research on their use in multilingual domain is limited as existing approaches still rely on machine translation to improve multilingual performance. To bridge this gap we introduce M2Lingual, the first fully synthetic, multi-turn multilingual dataset having 175K conversations across 70 languages with a balanced mix of high, low and mid-resourced languages. M2Lingual is constructed using a cost-efficient and scalable method that uses our novel two-step Evol prompt taxonomy to transform a small set of human written instructions to complex and challenging conversations. Results across three model families, six baseline datasets and evaluation spanning 31 languages demonstrates the effectiveness of M2Lingual over other datasets.

M2Lingual: Enhancing Multilingual, Multi-Turn Instruction Alignment in Large Language Models

The Bourne-Again Shell (Bash) command-line interface for Linux systems has complex syntax and requires extensive specialized knowledge. Using the natural language to Bash command (NL2SH) translation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for command composition circumvents these issues. However, the NL2SH performance of LLMs is difficult to assess due to inaccurate test data and unreliable heuristics for determining the functional equivalence of Bash commands. We present a manually verified test dataset of 600 instruction-command pairs and a training dataset of 40,939 pairs, increasing the size of previous datasets by 441% and 135%, respectively. Further, we present a novel functional equivalence heuristic that combines command execution with LLM evaluation of command outputs. Our heuristic can determine the functional equivalence of two Bash commands with 95% confidence, a 16% increase over previous heuristics. Evaluation of popular LLMs using our test dataset and heuristic demonstrates that parsing, in-context learning, in-weight learning and constrained decoding can improve NL2SH accuracy by up to 32%. Our findings emphasize the importance of dataset quality, execution-based evaluation and translation method for advancing NL2SH translation. Our code is available at https://github.com/westenfelder/NL2SH

LLM-Supported Natural Language to Bash Translation

Contextualized embeddings based on large language models (LLMs) are available for various languages, but their coverage is often limited for lower resourced languages. Using LLMs for such languages is often difficult due to a high computational cost; not only during training, but also during inference. Static word embeddings are much more resource-efficient (''green''), and thus still provide value, particularly for very low-resource languages. There is, however, a notable lack of comprehensive repositories with such embeddings for diverse languages. To address this gap, we present **, a centralized repository of green, static baseline embeddings for 87 mid- and low-resource languages. We compute ** embeddings with a novel method that enhances GloVe embeddings by integrating multilingual graph knowledge, which makes our static embeddings competitive with LLM representations, while being parameter-free at inference time. Our experiments demonstrate that ** embeddings outperform state-of-the-art contextualized embeddings from E5 on the task of lexical similarity. They remain competitive in extrinsic evaluation tasks like sentiment analysis and natural language inference, with average performance gaps of just 5-10% or less compared to state-of-the-art models, given a sufficient vocabulary overlap with the target task, and underperform only on topic classification. Our code and embeddings are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/DFKI.

GrEmLIn: A Repository of Green Baseline Embeddings for 87 Low-Resource Languages Injected with Multilingual Graph Knowledge

Nigeria is a multilingual country with 500+ languages. Naija is a Nigerian Pidgin spoken by approximately 120M speakers and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo). Although it has mainly been a spoken language until recently, there are some online platforms (e.g., Wikipedia), publishing in written Naija as well. West African Pidgin English (WAPE) is also spoken in Nigeria and it is used by BBC to broadcast news on the internet to a wider audience not only in Nigeria but also in other West African countries (e.g., Cameroon and Ghana). Through statistical analyses and Machine Translation experiments, our paper shows that these two pidgin varieties do not represent each other (i.e., there are linguistic differences in word order and vocabulary) and Generative AI operates only based on WAPE. In other words, Naija is underrepresented in Generative AI, and it is hard to teach LLMs with few examples. In addition to the statistical analyses, we also provide historical information on both pidgins as well as insights from the interviews conducted with volunteer Wikipedia contributors in Naija.

Does Generative AI speak Nigerian-Pidgin?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingualism in LLMs

Deceptive reviews are becoming increasingly common, especially given the increase in performance and the prevalence of LLMs. While work to date has addressed the development of models to differentiate between truthful and deceptive human reviews, much less is known about the distinction between real reviews and AI-authored fake reviews. Moreover, most of the research so far has focused primarily on English, with very little work dedicated to other languages. In this paper, we compile and make publicly available the MAiDE-up dataset, consisting of 10,000 real and 10,000 AI-generated fake hotel reviews, balanced across ten languages. Using this dataset, we conduct extensive linguistic analyses to (1) compare the AI fake hotel reviews to real hotel reviews, and (2) identify the factors that influence the deception detection model performance. We explore the effectiveness of several models for deception detection in hotel reviews across three main dimensions: sentiment, location, and language. We find that these dimensions influence how well we can detect AI-generated fake reviews.

MAiDE-up: Multilingual Deception Detection of AI-generated Hotel Reviews

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent questions across languages, we observe significant performance disparities. To address this, we explore the **C**ross-Lingual Self-**A**ligning ability of **L**anguage **M**odels (**CALM**) to align knowledge across languages. Specifically, for a given question, we sample multiple responses across different languages and select the most self-consistent response as the target, leaving the remaining responses as negative examples. We then employ direct preference optimization (DPO) to align the model's knowledge across different languages. Evaluations on the MEDQA and X-CSQA datasets demonstrate CALM's effectiveness in enhancing cross-lingual knowledge question answering, both in zero-shot and retrieval-augmented settings. We also found that increasing the number of languages involved in CALM training leads to higher accuracy and consistency. We offer a qualitative analysis of how cross-lingual consistency can enhance knowledge alignment and explore the method's generalizability.

CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, primarily through in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, the LLM is provided with examples that represent a given task such that it learns to generate answers for test inputs. However, access to these in-context examples is not guaranteed especially for low-resource or massively multilingual tasks. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach to mine in-context examples for machine translation (MT), enabling unsupervised MT (UMT) across different languages. Our approach begins with word-level mining to acquire word translations that are then used to perform sentence-level mining. As the quality of mined parallel pairs may not be optimal due to noise or mistakes, we introduce a filtering criterion to select the optimal in-context examples from a pool of unsupervised parallel sentences. We evaluate our approach using two multilingual LLMs on 288 directions from the FLORES-200 dataset~[nllbteam2022language] and analyze the impact of various linguistic features on performance. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our unsupervised approach in mining in-context examples for MT, leading to better or comparable translation performance as translation with regular in-context samples (extracted from human-annotated data), while also outperforming the other state-of-the-art UMT methods by an average of 7 BLEU points.

Effective Self-Mining of In-Context Examples for Unsupervised Machine Translation with LLMs

In this paper, we introduce Swan, a family of embedding models centred around the Arabic language, addressing both small-scale and large-scale use cases. Swan includes two variants: Swan-Small, based on ARBERTv2, and Swan-Large, built on ArMistral, a pretrained Arabic large language model. To evaluate these models, we propose ArabicMTEB, a comprehensive benchmark suite that assesses cross-lingual, multi-dialectal, multi-domain, and multi-cultural Arabic text embedding performance, covering eight diverse tasks and spanning 94 datasets. Swan-Large achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming Multilingual-E5-large in most Arabic tasks, while the Swan-Small consistently surpasses Multilingual-E5-base. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that Swan models are dialectally and culturally aware, excelling across various Arabic domains while offering significant monetary efficiency. This work significantly advances the field of Arabic language modelling and provides valuable resources for future research and applications in Arabic natural language processing. Our models and benchmarks will be made publicly accessible for research.

Swan and ArabicMTEB: Dialect-Aware, Arabic-Centric, Cross-Lingual, and Cross-Cultural Embedding Models and Benchmarks

The evaluation of image captions, looking at both linguistic fluency and semantic correspondence to visual contents, has witnessed a significant effort. Still, despite advancements such as the CLIPScore metric, multilingual captioning evaluation has remained relatively unexplored. This work presents several strategies, and extensive experiments, related to evaluating CLIPScore variants in multilingual settings. To address the lack of multilingual test data, we consider two different strategies: (1) using quality aware machine-translated datasets with human judgements, and (2) re-purposing multilingual datasets that target semantic inference and reasoning. Our results highlight the potential of finetuned multilingual models to generalize across languages and to handle complex linguistic challenges. Tests with machine-translated data show that multilingual CLIPScore models can maintain a high correlation with human judgements across different languages, and additional tests with natively multilingual and multicultural data further attest to the high-quality assessments.

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Taxi1500: A Dataset for Multilingual Text Classification in 1500 Languages

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Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation