Vivek Iyer

Vivek Iyer, Bhavitvya Malik, Pavel Stepachev et al.

Despite the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Machine Translation (MT), their performance in low-resource languages (LRLs) still lags significantly behind Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. In this work, we explore what it would take to adapt LLMs for the low-resource setting. Particularly, we re-examine the role of two factors: a) the importance and application of parallel data, and b) diversity in Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Recently, parallel data has seen reduced use in adapting LLMs for MT, while data diversity has been embraced to promote transfer across languages and tasks. However, for low-resource LLM-MT, we show that the opposite is true for both considerations: a) parallel data is critical during both pre-training and SFT; b) diversity tends to cause interference instead of transfer. Our experiments with three LLMs across two low-resourced language groups -- Indigenous American and North-East Indian -- reveal consistent trends, underscoring the generalizability of our findings. We believe these insights will be valuable for scaling to massively multilingual LLM-MT models that can effectively serve LRLs.

Simran Khanuja, Vivek Iyer, Claire He et al.

Beyond conventional paradigms of translating speech and text, recently, there has been interest in automated transcreation of images to facilitate localization of visual content across different cultures. Attempts to define this as a formal Machine Learning (ML) problem have been impeded by the lack of automatic evaluation mechanisms, with previous work relying solely on human evaluation. In this paper, we seek to close this gap by proposing a suite of automatic evaluation metrics inspired by machine translation (MT) metrics, categorized into: a) Object-based, b) Embedding-based, and c) VLM-based. Drawing on theories from translation studies and real-world transcreation practices, we identify three critical dimensions of image transcreation: cultural relevance, semantic equivalence and visual similarity, and design our metrics to evaluate systems along these axes. Our results show that proprietary VLMs best identify cultural relevance and semantic equivalence, while vision-encoder representations are adept at measuring visual similarity. Meta-evaluation across 7 countries shows our metrics agree strongly with human ratings, with average segment-level correlations ranging from 0.55-0.87. Finally, through a discussion of the merits and demerits of each metric, we offer a robust framework for automated image transcreation evaluation, grounded in both theoretical foundations and practical application. Our code can be found here: https://github.com/simran-khanuja/automatic-eval-img-transcreation.

Vivek Iyer, Arvind Agarwal, Harshit Kumar

Ontology Alignment is an important research problem applied to various fields such as data integration, data transfer, data preparation, etc. State-of-the-art (SOTA) Ontology Alignment systems typically use naive domain-dependent approaches with handcrafted rules or domain-specific architectures, making them unscalable and inefficient. In this work, we propose VeeAlign, a Deep Learning based model that uses a novel dual-attention mechanism to compute the contextualized representation of a concept which, in turn, is used to discover alignments. By doing this, not only is our approach able to exploit both syntactic and semantic information encoded in ontologies, it is also, by design, flexible and scalable to different domains with minimal effort. We evaluate our model on four different datasets from different domains and languages, and establish its superiority through these results as well as detailed ablation studies. The code and datasets used are available at https://github.com/Remorax/VeeAlign.

Vivek Iyer, Arvind Agarwal, Harshit Kumar

Ontology Alignment is an important research problem that finds application in various fields such as data integration, data transfer, data preparation etc. State-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures in Ontology Alignment typically use naive domain-dependent approaches with handcrafted rules and manually assigned values, making them unscalable and inefficient. Deep Learning approaches for ontology alignment use domain-specific architectures that are not only in-extensible to other datasets and domains, but also typically perform worse than rule-based approaches due to various limitations including over-fitting of models, sparsity of datasets etc. In this work, we propose VeeAlign, a Deep Learning based model that uses a dual-attention mechanism to compute the contextualized representation of a concept in order to learn alignments. By doing so, not only does our approach exploit both syntactic and semantic structure of ontologies, it is also, by design, flexible and scalable to different domains with minimal effort. We validate our approach on various datasets from different domains and in multilingual settings, and show its superior performance over SOTA methods.