PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Zhihan, Lee, Dong-Ho, Fang, Yuwei, Yu, Wenhao, Jia, Mengzhao, Jiang, Meng, Barbieri, Francesco
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Zhang, Zhihan
Lee, Dong-Ho
Fang, Yuwei
Yu, Wenhao
Jia, Mengzhao
Jiang, Meng
Barbieri, Francesco
author_facet Zhang, Zhihan
Lee, Dong-Ho
Fang, Yuwei
Yu, Wenhao
Jia, Mengzhao
Jiang, Meng
Barbieri, Francesco
contents Instruction tuning has remarkably advanced large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to diverse human instructions. Despite the success in high-resource languages, its application in lower-resource ones faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages, stemming from the uneven language distribution in their pre-training data. To tackle this issue, we propose pivot language guided generation (PLUG), an approach that utilizes a high-resource language, primarily English, as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resource languages. It trains the model to first process instructions in the pivot language, and then produce responses in the target language. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark, X-AlpacaEval, of instructions in 4 languages (Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish), each annotated by professional translators. Our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in the instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average, compared to directly responding in the target language alone. Further experiments validate the versatility of our approach by employing alternative pivot languages beyond English to assist languages where LLMs exhibit lower proficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ytyz1307zzh/PLUG.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning
Zhang, Zhihan
Lee, Dong-Ho
Fang, Yuwei
Yu, Wenhao
Jia, Mengzhao
Jiang, Meng
Barbieri, Francesco
Computation and Language
Instruction tuning has remarkably advanced large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to diverse human instructions. Despite the success in high-resource languages, its application in lower-resource ones faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages, stemming from the uneven language distribution in their pre-training data. To tackle this issue, we propose pivot language guided generation (PLUG), an approach that utilizes a high-resource language, primarily English, as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resource languages. It trains the model to first process instructions in the pivot language, and then produce responses in the target language. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark, X-AlpacaEval, of instructions in 4 languages (Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish), each annotated by professional translators. Our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in the instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average, compared to directly responding in the target language alone. Further experiments validate the versatility of our approach by employing alternative pivot languages beyond English to assist languages where LLMs exhibit lower proficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ytyz1307zzh/PLUG.
title PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08711