Weerayut Buaphet

Weerayut Buaphet, Thanh-Nhi Nguyen, Risa Kondo et al.

Social media data has been of interest to Natural Language Processing (NLP) practitioners for over a decade, because of its richness in information, but also challenges for automatic processing. Since language use is more informal, spontaneous, and adheres to many different sociolects, the performance of NLP models often deteriorates. One solution to this problem is to transform data to a standard variant before processing it, which is also called lexical normalization. There has been a wide variety of benchmarks and models proposed for this task. The MultiLexNorm benchmark proposed to unify these efforts, but it consists almost solely of languages from the Indo-European language family in the Latin script. Hence, we propose an extension to MultiLexNorm, which covers 5 Asian languages from different language families in 4 different scripts. We show that the previous state-of-the-art model performs worse on the new languages and propose a new architecture based on Large Language Models (LLMs), which shows more robust performance. Finally, we analyze remaining errors, revealing future directions for this task.

Parinthapat Pengpun, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Weerayut Buaphet et al. · deepmind, mila

We present a synthetic data approach for instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) for low-resource languages in a data-efficient manner, specifically focusing on Thai. We identify three key properties that contribute to the effectiveness of instruction-tuning datasets: fluency, diversity, and cultural context. We propose a seed-data-free framework for generating synthetic instruction-tuning data that incorporates these essential properties. Our framework employs an LLM to generate diverse topics, retrieve relevant contexts from Wikipedia, and create instructions for various tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and conversation. The experimental results show that our best-performing synthetic dataset, which incorporates all three key properties, achieves competitive performance using only 5,000 instructions when compared to state-of-the-art Thai LLMs trained on hundreds of thousands of instructions. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/parinzee/seed-free-synthetic-instruct.

Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett et al.

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heterogeneous web data often used to train multilingual language models. In this paper, we introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. Many of the included languages have been previously under-served, making CommonLID a key resource for developing more representative high-quality text corpora. We show CommonLID's value by using it, alongside five other common evaluation sets, to test eight popular LID models. We analyse our results to situate our contribution and to provide an overview of the state of the art. In particular, we highlight that existing evaluations overestimate LID accuracy for many languages in the web domain. We make CommonLID and the code used to create it available under an open, permissive license.