Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Nguyen, Xuan-Phi, Aljunied, Sharifah Mahani, Joty, Shafiq, Bing, Lidong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910535221510144
author Nguyen, Xuan-Phi
Aljunied, Sharifah Mahani
Joty, Shafiq
Bing, Lidong
author_facet Nguyen, Xuan-Phi
Aljunied, Sharifah Mahani
Joty, Shafiq
Bing, Lidong
contents Large language models (LLMs) are known to effectively perform tasks by simply observing few exemplars. However, in low-resource languages, obtaining such hand-picked exemplars can still be challenging, where unsupervised techniques may be necessary. Moreover, competent generative capabilities of LLMs are observed only in high-resource languages, while their performances among under-represented languages fall behind due to pre-training data imbalance. To elicit LLMs' ability onto low-resource languages without any supervised data, we propose to assemble synthetic exemplars from a diverse set of high-resource languages to prompt the LLMs to translate from any language into English. These prompts are then used to create intra-lingual exemplars to perform tasks in the target languages. Our unsupervised prompting method performs on par with supervised few-shot learning in LLMs of different sizes for translations between English and 13 Indic and 21 African low-resource languages. We also show that fine-tuning a 7B model on data generated from our method helps it perform competitively with a 175B model. In non-English translation tasks, our method even outperforms supervised prompting by up to 3 chrF++ in many low-resource languages. When evaluated on zero-shot multilingual summarization, our method surpasses other English-pivoting baselines by up to 4 ROUGE-L and is also favored by GPT-4.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_11372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts
Nguyen, Xuan-Phi
Aljunied, Sharifah Mahani
Joty, Shafiq
Bing, Lidong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) are known to effectively perform tasks by simply observing few exemplars. However, in low-resource languages, obtaining such hand-picked exemplars can still be challenging, where unsupervised techniques may be necessary. Moreover, competent generative capabilities of LLMs are observed only in high-resource languages, while their performances among under-represented languages fall behind due to pre-training data imbalance. To elicit LLMs' ability onto low-resource languages without any supervised data, we propose to assemble synthetic exemplars from a diverse set of high-resource languages to prompt the LLMs to translate from any language into English. These prompts are then used to create intra-lingual exemplars to perform tasks in the target languages. Our unsupervised prompting method performs on par with supervised few-shot learning in LLMs of different sizes for translations between English and 13 Indic and 21 African low-resource languages. We also show that fine-tuning a 7B model on data generated from our method helps it perform competitively with a 175B model. In non-English translation tasks, our method even outperforms supervised prompting by up to 3 chrF++ in many low-resource languages. When evaluated on zero-shot multilingual summarization, our method surpasses other English-pivoting baselines by up to 4 ROUGE-L and is also favored by GPT-4.
title Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11372