Daily Papers

Effective evaluation of the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to overestimation due to data exposure of evaluation benchmarks. We introduce a framework for producing linguistic reasoning problems that reduces the effect of memorisation in model performance estimates and apply this framework to develop LINGOLY-TOO, a challenging evaluation benchmark for linguistic reasoning. By developing orthographic templates, we dynamically obfuscate the writing systems of real languages to generate numerous question variations. These variations preserve the reasoning steps required for each solution while reducing the likelihood of specific problem instances appearing in model training data. Our experiments demonstrate that frontier models, including OpenAI o1-preview and DeepSeem R1, struggle with advanced reasoning. Our analysis also shows that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance in accuracy across permutations of the same problem, and on average perform better on questions appearing in their original orthography. Our findings highlight the opaque nature of response generation in LLMs and provide evidence that prior data exposure contributes to overestimating the reasoning capabilities of frontier models.

This article introduces NB-Whisper, an adaptation of OpenAI's Whisper, specifically fine-tuned for Norwegian language Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We highlight its key contributions and summarise the results achieved in converting spoken Norwegian into written forms and translating other languages into Norwegian. We show that we are able to improve the Norwegian Bokm{\aa}l transcription by OpenAI Whisper Large-v3 from a WER of 10.4 to 6.6 on the Fleurs Dataset and from 6.8 to 2.2 on the NST dataset.

In this paper, we develop a new method to automatically convert 2D line drawings from three orthographic views into 3D CAD models. Existing methods for this problem reconstruct 3D models by back-projecting the 2D observations into 3D space while maintaining explicit correspondence between the input and output. Such methods are sensitive to errors and noises in the input, thus often fail in practice where the input drawings created by human designers are imperfect. To overcome this difficulty, we leverage the attention mechanism in a Transformer-based sequence generation model to learn flexible mappings between the input and output. Further, we design shape programs which are suitable for generating the objects of interest to boost the reconstruction accuracy and facilitate CAD modeling applications. Experiments on a new benchmark dataset show that our method significantly outperforms existing ones when the inputs are noisy or incomplete.

We introduce OG-VLA, a novel architecture and learning framework that combines the generalization strengths of Vision Language Action models (VLAs) with the robustness of 3D-aware policies. We address the challenge of mapping natural language instructions and multi-view RGBD observations to quasi-static robot actions. 3D-aware robot policies achieve state-of-the-art performance on precise robot manipulation tasks, but struggle with generalization to unseen instructions, scenes, and objects. On the other hand, VLAs excel at generalizing across instructions and scenes, but can be sensitive to camera and robot pose variations. We leverage prior knowledge embedded in language and vision foundation models to improve generalization of 3D-aware keyframe policies. OG-VLA projects input observations from diverse views into a point cloud which is then rendered from canonical orthographic views, ensuring input view invariance and consistency between input and output spaces. These canonical views are processed with a vision backbone, a Large Language Model (LLM), and an image diffusion model to generate images that encode the next position and orientation of the end-effector on the input scene. Evaluations on the Arnold and Colosseum benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art generalization to unseen environments, with over 40% relative improvements while maintaining robust performance in seen settings. We also show real-world adaption in 3 to 5 demonstrations along with strong generalization. Videos and resources at https://og-vla.github.io/

This paper reports the construction of the Teochew-Wild, a speech corpus of the Teochew dialect. The corpus includes 18.9 hours of in-the-wild Teochew speech data from multiple speakers, covering both formal and colloquial expressions, with precise orthographic and pinyin annotations. Additionally, we provide supplementary text processing tools and resources to propel research and applications in speech tasks for this low-resource language, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available Teochew dataset with accurate orthographic annotations. We conduct experiments on the corpus, and the results validate its effectiveness in ASR and TTS tasks.

The use of subword embedding has proved to be a major innovation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). It helps NMT to learn better context vectors for Low Resource Languages (LRLs) so as to predict the target words by better modelling the morphologies of the two languages and also the morphosyntax transfer. Even so, their performance for translation in Indian language to Indian language scenario is still not as good as for resource-rich languages. One reason for this is the relative morphological richness of Indian languages, while another is that most of them fall into the extremely low resource or zero-shot categories. Since most major Indian languages use Indic or Brahmi origin scripts, the text written in them is highly phonetic in nature and phonetically similar in terms of abstract letters and their arrangements. We use these characteristics of Indian languages and their scripts to propose an approach based on common multilingual Latin-based encodings (WX notation) that take advantage of language similarity while addressing the morphological complexity issue in NMT. These multilingual Latin-based encodings in NMT, together with Byte Pair Embedding (BPE) allow us to better exploit their phonetic and orthographic as well as lexical similarities to improve the translation quality by projecting different but similar languages on the same orthographic-phonetic character space. We verify the proposed approach by demonstrating experiments on similar language pairs (Gujarati-Hindi, Marathi-Hindi, Nepali-Hindi, Maithili-Hindi, Punjabi-Hindi, and Urdu-Hindi) under low resource conditions. The proposed approach shows an improvement in a majority of cases, in one case as much as ~10 BLEU points compared to baseline techniques for similar language pairs. We also get up to ~1 BLEU points improvement on distant and zero-shot language pairs.

In this paper, we study pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models for a group of related languages, with a focus on Indic languages. We present IndicBART, a multilingual, sequence-to-sequence pre-trained model focusing on 11 Indic languages and English. IndicBART utilizes the orthographic similarity between Indic scripts to improve transfer learning between similar Indic languages. We evaluate IndicBART on two NLG tasks: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and extreme summarization. Our experiments on NMT and extreme summarization show that a model specific to related languages like IndicBART is competitive with large pre-trained models like mBART50 despite being significantly smaller. It also performs well on very low-resource translation scenarios where languages are not included in pre-training or fine-tuning. Script sharing, multilingual training, and better utilization of limited model capacity contribute to the good performance of the compact IndicBART model.

Feed-forward 3D generative models like the Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) have demonstrated exceptional generation speed. However, the transformer-based methods do not leverage the geometric priors of the triplane component in their architecture, often leading to sub-optimal quality given the limited size of 3D data and slow training. In this work, we present the Convolutional Reconstruction Model (CRM), a high-fidelity feed-forward single image-to-3D generative model. Recognizing the limitations posed by sparse 3D data, we highlight the necessity of integrating geometric priors into network design. CRM builds on the key observation that the visualization of triplane exhibits spatial correspondence of six orthographic images. First, it generates six orthographic view images from a single input image, then feeds these images into a convolutional U-Net, leveraging its strong pixel-level alignment capabilities and significant bandwidth to create a high-resolution triplane. CRM further employs Flexicubes as geometric representation, facilitating direct end-to-end optimization on textured meshes. Overall, our model delivers a high-fidelity textured mesh from an image in just 10 seconds, without any test-time optimization.

We introduce Mono4DGS-HDR, the first system for reconstructing renderable 4D high dynamic range (HDR) scenes from unposed monocular low dynamic range (LDR) videos captured with alternating exposures. To tackle such a challenging problem, we present a unified framework with two-stage optimization approach based on Gaussian Splatting. The first stage learns a video HDR Gaussian representation in orthographic camera coordinate space, eliminating the need for camera poses and enabling robust initial HDR video reconstruction. The second stage transforms video Gaussians into world space and jointly refines the world Gaussians with camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a temporal luminance regularization strategy to enhance the temporal consistency of the HDR appearance. Since our task has not been studied before, we construct a new evaluation benchmark using publicly available datasets for HDR video reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mono4DGS-HDR significantly outperforms alternative solutions adapted from state-of-the-art methods in both rendering quality and speed.

Multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable benchmark performance, but we find they continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages across contemporary LLM families. This discrepancy arises from the fact that LLMs are pretrained with orthographic scripts, which are dominated by Latin characters that obscure their shared phonology with non-Latin scripts. We propose leveraging phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations. Our study demonstrates that integrating phonemic signals improves performance across both non-Latin and Latin languages, with a particularly significant impact on closing the performance gap between the two. Through detailed experiments, we show that phonemic and orthographic scripts retrieve distinct examples for in-context learning (ICL). This motivates our proposed Mixed-ICL retrieval strategy, where further aggregation leads to our significant performance improvements for both Latin script languages (up to 12.6%) and non-Latin script languages (up to 15.1%) compared to randomized ICL retrieval.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable performance on a wide variety of tasks. Most LLMs split text into multi-character tokens and process them as atomic units without direct access to individual characters. This raises the question: To what extent can LLMs learn orthographic information? To answer this, we propose a new benchmark, CUTE, which features a collection of tasks designed to test the orthographic knowledge of LLMs. We evaluate popular LLMs on CUTE, finding that most of them seem to know the spelling of their tokens, yet fail to use this information effectively to manipulate text, calling into question how much of this knowledge is generalizable.

Bilingual lexical processing is shaped by the complex interplay of phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of two languages within an integrated mental lexicon. In humans, this is evident in the ease with which cognate words - words similar in both orthographic form and meaning (e.g., blind, meaning "sightless" in both English and German) - are processed, compared to the challenges posed by interlingual homographs, which share orthographic form but differ in meaning (e.g., gift, meaning "present" in English but "poison" in German). We investigate how multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) handle such phenomena, focusing on English-Spanish, English-French, and English-German cognates, non-cognate, and interlingual homographs. Specifically, we evaluate their ability to disambiguate meanings and make semantic judgments, both when these word types are presented in isolation or within sentence contexts. Our findings reveal that while certain LLMs demonstrate strong performance in recognizing cognates and non-cognates in isolation, they exhibit significant difficulty in disambiguating interlingual homographs, often performing below random baselines. This suggests LLMs tend to rely heavily on orthographic similarities rather than semantic understanding when interpreting interlingual homographs. Further, we find LLMs exhibit difficulty in retrieving word meanings, with performance in isolative disambiguation tasks having no correlation with semantic understanding. Finally, we study how the LLM processes interlingual homographs in incongruent sentences. We find models to opt for different strategies in understanding English and non-English homographs, highlighting a lack of a unified approach to handling cross-lingual ambiguities.

Single-image human mesh recovery is a challenging task due to the ill-posed nature of simultaneous body shape, pose, and camera estimation. Existing estimators work well on images taken from afar, but they break down as the person moves close to the camera. Moreover, current methods fail to achieve both accurate 3D pose and 2D alignment at the same time. Error is mainly introduced by inaccurate perspective projection heuristically derived from orthographic parameters. To resolve this long-standing challenge, we present our method BLADE which accurately recovers perspective parameters from a single image without heuristic assumptions. We start from the inverse relationship between perspective distortion and the person's Z-translation Tz, and we show that Tz can be reliably estimated from the image. We then discuss the important role of Tz for accurate human mesh recovery estimated from close-range images. Finally, we show that, once Tz and the 3D human mesh are estimated, one can accurately recover the focal length and full 3D translation. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world close-range images show that our method is the first to accurately recover projection parameters from a single image, and consequently attain state-of-the-art accuracy on 3D pose estimation and 2D alignment for a wide range of images. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/blade/

Cross-lingual and multi-lingual training of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been extensively investigated in the supervised setting. This assumes the existence of a parallel corpus of speech and orthographic transcriptions. Recently, contrastive predictive coding (CPC) algorithms have been proposed to pretrain ASR systems with unlabelled data. In this work, we investigate whether unsupervised pretraining transfers well across languages. We show that a slight modification of the CPC pretraining extracts features that transfer well to other languages, being on par or even outperforming supervised pretraining. This shows the potential of unsupervised methods for languages with few linguistic resources.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing, yet their effectiveness in handling historical languages remains largely unexplored. This study examines the performance of open-source LLMs in part-of-speech (POS) tagging for Old Occitan, a historical language characterized by non-standardized orthography and significant diachronic variation. Through comparative analysis of two distinct corpora-hagiographical and medical texts-we evaluate how current models handle the inherent challenges of processing a low-resource historical language. Our findings demonstrate critical limitations in LLM performance when confronted with extreme orthographic and syntactic variability. We provide detailed error analysis and specific recommendations for improving model performance in historical language processing. This research advances our understanding of LLM capabilities in challenging linguistic contexts while offering practical insights for both computational linguistics and historical language studies.

Language models are typically trained on large corpora of text in their default orthographic form. However, this is not the only option; representing data as streams of phonemes can offer unique advantages, from deeper insights into phonological language acquisition to improved performance on sound-based tasks. The challenge lies in evaluating the impact of phoneme-based training, as most benchmarks are also orthographic. To address this, we develop a pipeline to convert text datasets into a continuous stream of phonemes. We apply this pipeline to the 100-million-word pre-training dataset from the BabyLM challenge, as well as to standard language and grammatical benchmarks, enabling us to pre-train and evaluate a model using phonemic input representations. Our results show that while phoneme-based training slightly reduces performance on traditional language understanding tasks, it offers valuable analytical and practical benefits.

Wikipedia can easily be justified as a behemoth, considering the sheer volume of content that is added or removed every minute to its several projects. This creates an immense scope, in the field of natural language processing towards developing automated tools for content moderation and review. In this paper we propose Self Attentive Revision Encoder (StRE) which leverages orthographic similarity of lexical units toward predicting the quality of new edits. In contrast to existing propositions which primarily employ features like page reputation, editor activity or rule based heuristics, we utilize the textual content of the edits which, we believe contains superior signatures of their quality. More specifically, we deploy deep encoders to generate representations of the edits from its text content, which we then leverage to infer quality. We further contribute a novel dataset containing 21M revisions across 32K Wikipedia pages and demonstrate that StRE outperforms existing methods by a significant margin at least 17% and at most 103%. Our pretrained model achieves such result after retraining on a set as small as 20% of the edits in a wikipage. This, to the best of our knowledge, is also the first attempt towards employing deep language models to the enormous domain of automated content moderation and review in Wikipedia.

Most speech recognition tasks pertain to mapping words across two modalities: acoustic and orthographic. In this work, we suggest learning encoders that map variable-length, acoustic or phonetic, sequences that represent words into fixed-dimensional vectors in a shared latent space; such that the distance between two word vectors represents how closely the two words sound. Instead of directly learning the distances between word vectors, we employ weak supervision and model a binary classification task to predict whether two inputs, one of each modality, represent the same word given a distance threshold. We explore various deep-learning models, bimodal contrastive losses, and techniques for mining hard negative examples such as the semi-supervised technique of self-labeling. Our best model achieves an F_1 score of 0.95 for the binary classification task.

Despite the latest remarkable advances in generative modeling, efficient generation of high-quality 3D assets from textual prompts remains a difficult task. A key challenge lies in data scarcity: the most extensive 3D datasets encompass merely millions of assets, while their 2D counterparts contain billions of text-image pairs. To address this, we propose a novel approach which harnesses the power of large, pretrained 2D diffusion models. More specifically, our approach, HexaGen3D, fine-tunes a pretrained text-to-image model to jointly predict 6 orthographic projections and the corresponding latent triplane. We then decode these latents to generate a textured mesh. HexaGen3D does not require per-sample optimization, and can infer high-quality and diverse objects from textual prompts in 7 seconds, offering significantly better quality-to-latency trade-offs when comparing to existing approaches. Furthermore, HexaGen3D demonstrates strong generalization to new objects or compositions.

The generation of industrial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models from user requests and specifications is crucial to enhancing efficiency in modern manufacturing. Traditional methods of CAD generation rely heavily on manual inputs and struggle with complex or non-standard designs, making them less suited for dynamic industrial needs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Text2CAD, a novel framework that employs stable diffusion models tailored to automate the generation process and efficiently bridge the gap between user specifications in text and functional CAD models. This approach directly translates the user's textural descriptions into detailed isometric images, which are then precisely converted into orthographic views, e.g., top, front, and side, providing sufficient information to reconstruct 3D CAD models. This process not only streamlines the creation of CAD models from textual descriptions but also ensures that the resulting models uphold physical and dimensional consistency essential for practical engineering applications. Our experimental results show that Text2CAD effectively generates technical drawings that are accurately translated into high-quality 3D CAD models, showing substantial potential to revolutionize CAD automation in response to user demands.

This study introduces the eFontes models for automatic linguistic annotation of Medieval Latin texts, focusing on lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological feature determination. Using the Transformers library, these models were trained on Universal Dependencies (UD) corpora and the newly developed eFontes corpus of Polish Medieval Latin. The research evaluates the models' performance, addressing challenges such as orthographic variations and the integration of Latinized vernacular terms. The models achieved high accuracy rates: lemmatization at 92.60%, part-of-speech tagging at 83.29%, and morphological feature determination at 88.57%. The findings underscore the importance of high-quality annotated corpora and propose future enhancements, including extending the models to Named Entity Recognition.

Recovering a 3D surface from its surface normal map, a problem known as normal integration, is a key component for photometric shape reconstruction techniques such as shape-from-shading and photometric stereo. The vast majority of existing approaches for normal integration handle only implicitly the presence of depth discontinuities and are limited to orthographic or ideal pinhole cameras. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation that allows modeling discontinuities explicitly and handling generic central cameras. Our key idea is based on a local planarity assumption, that we model through constraints between surface normals and ray directions. Compared to existing methods, our approach more accurately approximates the relation between depth and surface normals, achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard normal integration benchmark, and is the first to directly handle generic central camera models.

Real-time text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenging due to the language's orthographic complexity. Existing solutions ignore crucial phonetic features such as stress that remain underspecified even when vowel marks are added. To address these limitations, we introduce Phonikud, a lightweight, open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified IPA transcriptions. Our approach adapts an existing diacritization model with lightweight adaptors, incurring negligible additional latency. We also contribute the ILSpeech dataset of transcribed Hebrew speech with IPA annotations, serving as a benchmark for Hebrew G2P, as training data for TTS systems, and enabling audio-to-IPA for evaluating TTS performance while capturing important phonetic details. Our results demonstrate that Phonikud G2P conversion more accurately predicts phonemes from Hebrew text compared to prior methods, and that this enables training of effective real-time Hebrew TTS models with superior speed-accuracy trade-offs. We release our code, data, and models at https: //phonikud.github.io.

Pronunciation dictionaries are an important component in the process of speech forced alignment. The accuracy of these dictionaries has a strong effect on the aligned speech data since they help the mapping between orthographic transcriptions and acoustic signals. In this paper, I present the creation of a comprehensive pronunciation dictionary in Spanish (ESPADA) that can be used in most of the dialect variants of Spanish data. Current dictionaries focus on specific regional variants, but with the flexible nature of our tool, it can be readily applied to capture the most common phonetic differences across major dialectal variants. We propose improvements to current pronunciation dictionaries as well as mapping other relevant annotations such as morphological and lexical information. In terms of size, it is currently the most complete dictionary with more than 628,000 entries, representing words from 16 countries. All entries come with their corresponding pronunciations, morphological and lexical tagging, and other relevant information for phonetic analysis: stress patterns, phonotactics, IPA transcriptions, and more. This aims to equip socio-phonetic researchers with a complete open-source tool that enhances dialectal research within socio-phonetic frameworks in the Spanish language.

Machine translation focuses mainly on high-resource languages (HRLs), while low-resource languages (LRLs) like Taiwanese Hokkien are relatively under-explored. The study aims to address this gap by developing a dual translation model between Taiwanese Hokkien and both Traditional Mandarin Chinese and English. We employ a pre-trained LLaMA 2-7B model specialized in Traditional Mandarin Chinese to leverage the orthographic similarities between Taiwanese Hokkien Han and Traditional Mandarin Chinese. Our comprehensive experiments involve translation tasks across various writing systems of Taiwanese Hokkien as well as between Taiwanese Hokkien and other HRLs. We find that the use of a limited monolingual corpus still further improves the model's Taiwanese Hokkien capabilities. We then utilize our translation model to standardize all Taiwanese Hokkien writing systems into Hokkien Han, resulting in further performance improvements. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation method incorporating back-translation and GPT-4 to ensure reliable translation quality assessment even for LRLs. The study contributes to narrowing the resource gap for Taiwanese Hokkien and empirically investigates the advantages and limitations of pre-training and fine-tuning based on LLaMA 2.

Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world's 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by introducing AfroLID, a neural LID toolkit for 517 African languages and varieties. AfroLID exploits a multi-domain web dataset manually curated from across 14 language families utilizing five orthographic systems. When evaluated on our blind Test set, AfroLID achieves 95.89 F_1-score. We also compare AfroLID to five existing LID tools that each cover a small number of African languages, finding it to outperform them on most languages. We further show the utility of AfroLID in the wild by testing it on the acutely under-served Twitter domain. Finally, we offer a number of controlled case studies and perform a linguistically-motivated error analysis that allow us to both showcase AfroLID's powerful capabilities and limitations.

Yor\`ub\'a is a widely spoken West African language with a writing system rich in orthographic and tonal diacritics. They provide morphological information, are crucial for lexical disambiguation, pronunciation and are vital for any computational Speech or Natural Language Processing tasks. However diacritic marks are commonly excluded from electronic texts due to limited device and application support as well as general education on proper usage. We report on recent efforts at dataset cultivation. By aggregating and improving disparate texts from the web and various personal libraries, we were able to significantly grow our clean Yor\`ub\'a dataset from a majority Bibilical text corpora with three sources to millions of tokens from over a dozen sources. We evaluate updated diacritic restoration models on a new, general purpose, public-domain Yor\`ub\'a evaluation dataset of modern journalistic news text, selected to be multi-purpose and reflecting contemporary usage. All pre-trained models, datasets and source-code have been released as an open-source project to advance efforts on Yor\`ub\'a language technology.

The quest for human imitative AI has been an enduring topic in AI research since its inception. The technical evolution and emerging capabilities of the latest cohort of large language models (LLMs) have reinvigorated the subject beyond academia to the cultural zeitgeist. While recent NLP evaluation benchmark tasks test some aspects of human-imitative behaviour (e.g., BIG-bench's 'human-like behavior' tasks), few, if not none, examine creative problem solving abilities. Creative problem solving in humans is a well-studied topic in cognitive neuroscience with standardized tests that predominantly use the ability to associate (heterogeneous) connections among clue words as a metric for creativity. Exposure to misleading stimuli - distractors dubbed red herrings - impede human performance in such tasks via the fixation effect and Einstellung paradigm. In cognitive neuroscience studies, such fixations are experimentally induced by pre-exposing participants to orthographically similar incorrect words to subsequent word-fragments or clues. The popular British quiz show Only Connect's Connecting Wall segment essentially mimics Mednick's Remote Associates Test (RAT) formulation with built-in, deliberate red herrings, which makes it an ideal proxy dataset to explore and study fixation effect and Einstellung paradigm from cognitive neuroscience in LLMs. In addition to presenting the novel Only Connect Wall (OCW) dataset, we also report results from our evaluation of selected pre-trained language models and LLMs (including OpenAI's GPT series) on creative problem solving tasks like grouping clue words by heterogeneous connections, and identifying correct open knowledge domain connections in respective groups. The code and link to the dataset are available at https://github.com/TaatiTeam/OCW.

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties. Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets. Following best annotation practices, our growing corpus features 170,800 tweets taken from 7 countries, labeled by annotators who are from those countries and can communicate in regionally-dominant varieties of English. Our corpus highlights the accuracy discrepancies in pre-trained language identifiers between western English and non-western (i.e., less standard) English varieties. We hope to contribute to the growing literature identifying and reducing the implicit demographic discrepancies in NLP.

Pretrained character-level language models were recently shown to be competitive with popular subword models across a range of NLP tasks. However, there has been little research on their effectiveness for neural machine translation (NMT). This work performs an extensive comparison across multiple languages and experimental conditions of state-of-the-art character- and subword-level pre-trained models (ByT5 and mT5, respectively) on NMT, showing the effectiveness of character-level modeling in translation, particularly in cases where training data is limited. In our analysis, we show how character models' performance gains are reflected in better translations of orthographically similar words and rare words. While evaluating the importance of source texts in driving model predictions, we highlight ByT5 word-level patterns suggesting an ability to modulate word and character-level information during the translation, providing insights into a potential weakness of character-level modeling. We conclude by assessing the efficiency tradeoff of character models, suggesting their usage in non-time-critical scenarios to boost translation quality.

An ability that underlies human syntactic knowledge is determining which words can appear in the similar structures (i.e. grouping words by their syntactic categories). These groupings enable humans to combine structures in order to communicate complex meanings. A foundational question is how do children acquire this ability underlying syntactic knowledge. In exploring this process, we will review various engineering approaches whose goal is similar to that of a child's -- without prior syntactic knowledge, correctly identify the parts of speech (POS) of the words in a sample of text. In reviewing these unsupervised tagging efforts, we will discuss common themes that support the advances in the models and their relevance for language acquisition. For example, we discuss how each model judges success (evaluation metrics), the "additional information" that constrains the POS learning (such as orthographic information), and the context used to determine POS (only previous word, words before and after the target, etc). The identified themes pave the way for future investigations into the cognitive processes that underpin the acquisition of syntactic categories and provide a useful layout of current state of the art unsupervised POS tagging models.

Language models are defined over a finite set of inputs, which creates a vocabulary bottleneck when we attempt to scale the number of supported languages. Tackling this bottleneck results in a trade-off between what can be represented in the embedding matrix and computational issues in the output layer. This paper introduces PIXEL, the Pixel-based Encoder of Language, which suffers from neither of these issues. PIXEL is a pretrained language model that renders text as images, making it possible to transfer representations across languages based on orthographic similarity or the co-activation of pixels. PIXEL is trained to reconstruct the pixels of masked patches, instead of predicting a distribution over tokens. We pretrain the 86M parameter PIXEL model on the same English data as BERT and evaluate on syntactic and semantic tasks in typologically diverse languages, including various non-Latin scripts. We find that PIXEL substantially outperforms BERT on syntactic and semantic processing tasks on scripts that are not found in the pretraining data, but PIXEL is slightly weaker than BERT when working with Latin scripts. Furthermore, we find that PIXEL is more robust to noisy text inputs than BERT, further confirming the benefits of modelling language with pixels.

In this paper, we introduce two resources: (i) G2P+, a tool for converting orthographic datasets to a consistent phonemic representation; and (ii) IPA CHILDES, a phonemic dataset of child-centered speech across 31 languages. Prior tools for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion result in phonemic vocabularies that are inconsistent with established phonemic inventories, an issue which G2P+ addresses by leveraging the inventories in the Phoible database. Using this tool, we augment CHILDES with phonemic transcriptions to produce IPA CHILDES. This new resource fills several gaps in existing phonemic datasets, which often lack multilingual coverage, spontaneous speech, and a focus on child-directed language. We demonstrate the utility of this dataset for phonological research by training phoneme language models on 11 languages and probing them for distinctive features, finding that the distributional properties of phonemes are sufficient to learn major class and place features cross-lingually.

Various evaluation metrics have been proposed for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), but many, particularly reference-free metrics, lack explainability. This lack of explainability hinders researchers from analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of GEC models and limits the ability to provide detailed feedback for users. To address this issue, we propose attributing sentence-level scores to individual edits, providing insight into how specific corrections contribute to the overall performance. For the attribution method, we use Shapley values, from cooperative game theory, to compute the contribution of each edit. Experiments with existing sentence-level metrics demonstrate high consistency across different edit granularities and show approximately 70\% alignment with human evaluations. In addition, we analyze biases in the metrics based on the attribution results, revealing trends such as the tendency to ignore orthographic edits. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/naist-nlp/gec-attribute.

This paper presents a novel Dialectal Sound and Vowelization Recovery framework, designed to recognize borrowed and dialectal sounds within phonologically diverse and dialect-rich languages, that extends beyond its standard orthographic sound sets. The proposed framework utilized a quantized sequence of input with(out) continuous pretrained self-supervised representation. We show the efficacy of the pipeline using limited data for Arabic, a dialect-rich language containing more than 22 major dialects. Phonetically correct transcribed speech resources for dialectal Arabic are scarce. Therefore, we introduce ArabVoice15, a first-of-its-kind, curated test set featuring 5 hours of dialectal speech across 15 Arab countries, with phonetically accurate transcriptions, including borrowed and dialect-specific sounds. We described in detail the annotation guideline along with the analysis of the dialectal confusion pairs. Our extensive evaluation includes both subjective -- human perception tests and objective measures. Our empirical results, reported with three test sets, show that with only one and half hours of training data, our model improve character error rate by ~ 7\% in ArabVoice15 compared to the baseline.

While WangchanBERTa has become the de facto standard in transformer-based Thai language modeling, it still has shortcomings in regard to the understanding of foreign words, most notably English words, which are often borrowed without orthographic assimilation into Thai in many contexts. We identify the lack of foreign vocabulary in WangchanBERTa's tokenizer as the main source of these shortcomings. We then expand WangchanBERTa's vocabulary via vocabulary transfer from XLM-R's pretrained tokenizer and pretrain a new model using the expanded tokenizer, starting from WangchanBERTa's checkpoint, on a new dataset that is larger than the one used to train WangchanBERTa. Our results show that our new pretrained model, PhayaThaiBERT, outperforms WangchanBERTa in many downstream tasks and datasets.

This work presents a new resource for borrowing identification and analyzes the performance and errors of several models on this task. We introduce a new annotated corpus of Spanish newswire rich in unassimilated lexical borrowings -- words from one language that are introduced into another without orthographic adaptation -- and use it to evaluate how several sequence labeling models (CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and Transformer-based models) perform. The corpus contains 370,000 tokens and is larger, more borrowing-dense, OOV-rich, and topic-varied than previous corpora available for this task. Our results show that a BiLSTM-CRF model fed with subword embeddings along with either Transformer-based embeddings pretrained on codeswitched data or a combination of contextualized word embeddings outperforms results obtained by a multilingual BERT-based model.

The increasing diversity of languages used on the web introduces a new level of complexity to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. We can no longer assume that textual content is written in one language or even the same language family. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build massive multilingual annotators with minimal human expertise and intervention. We describe a system that builds Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotators for 40 major languages using Wikipedia and Freebase. Our approach does not require NER human annotated datasets or language specific resources like treebanks, parallel corpora, and orthographic rules. The novelty of approach lies therein - using only language agnostic techniques, while achieving competitive performance. Our method learns distributed word representations (word embeddings) which encode semantic and syntactic features of words in each language. Then, we automatically generate datasets from Wikipedia link structure and Freebase attributes. Finally, we apply two preprocessing stages (oversampling and exact surface form matching) which do not require any linguistic expertise. Our evaluation is two fold: First, we demonstrate the system performance on human annotated datasets. Second, for languages where no gold-standard benchmarks are available, we propose a new method, distant evaluation, based on statistical machine translation.

We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal comparison, while avoiding the imposition of a restrictive task structure that might inhibit the expression of dialect features. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals significant differences in syntax and in the use of discourse markers. The dataset, which will be made publicly available with the publication of this paper, includes more than 20 hours of audio and more than 200,000 orthographically-transcribed tokens.

In this work, we introduce Unique3D, a novel image-to-3D framework for efficiently generating high-quality 3D meshes from single-view images, featuring state-of-the-art generation fidelity and strong generalizability. Previous methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) can produce diversified 3D results by distilling 3D knowledge from large 2D diffusion models, but they usually suffer from long per-case optimization time with inconsistent issues. Recent works address the problem and generate better 3D results either by finetuning a multi-view diffusion model or training a fast feed-forward model. However, they still lack intricate textures and complex geometries due to inconsistency and limited generated resolution. To simultaneously achieve high fidelity, consistency, and efficiency in single image-to-3D, we propose a novel framework Unique3D that includes a multi-view diffusion model with a corresponding normal diffusion model to generate multi-view images with their normal maps, a multi-level upscale process to progressively improve the resolution of generated orthographic multi-views, as well as an instant and consistent mesh reconstruction algorithm called ISOMER, which fully integrates the color and geometric priors into mesh results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Unique3D significantly outperforms other image-to-3D baselines in terms of geometric and textural details.

We present a new pre-trained language model (PLM) for Rabbinic Hebrew, termed Berel (BERT Embeddings for Rabbinic-Encoded Language). Whilst other PLMs exist for processing Hebrew texts (e.g., HeBERT, AlephBert), they are all trained on modern Hebrew texts, which diverges substantially from Rabbinic Hebrew in terms of its lexicographical, morphological, syntactic and orthographic norms. We demonstrate the superiority of Berel on Rabbinic texts via a challenge set of Hebrew homographs. We release the new model and homograph challenge set for unrestricted use.