Machine Translation Digest for Jun 21 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring advancements and challenges in machine translation and natural language processing. A common theme is the focus on multilingualism and language diversity, with studies addressing issues from data quality in multilingual datasets to tokenization challenges in Indian languages. Additionally, the role of language models and prompt optimization in shaping NLP's future is examined, highlighting ongoing innovations in the field.
Unveiling Factors for Enhanced POS Tagging: A Study of Low-Resource Medieval Romance Languages
Part-of-speech (POS) tagging remains a foundational component in natural language processing pipelines, particularly critical for historical text analysis at the intersection of computational linguistics and digital humanities. Despite significant advancements in modern large language models (LLMs) for ancient languages, their application to Medieval Romance languages presents distinctive challenges stemming from diachronic linguistic evolution, spelling variations, and labeled data scarcity. This study systematically investigates the central determinants of POS tagging performance across diverse corpora of Medieval Occitan, Medieval Spanish, and Medieval French texts, spanning biblical, hagiographical, medical, and dietary domains. Through rigorous experimentation, we evaluate how fine-tuning approaches, prompt engineering, model architectures, decoding strategies, and cross-lingual transfer learning techniques affect tagging accuracy. Our results reveal both notable limitations in LLMs' ability to process historical language variations and non-standardized spelling, as well as promising specialized techniques that effectively address the unique challenges presented by low-resource historical languages.
TPTT: Transforming Pretrained Transformer into Titans
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to remarkable progress in natural language processing, but their computational and memory demands remain a significant challenge, particularly for long-context inference. We introduce TPTT (Transforming Pretrained Transformer into Titans), a novel framework for enhancing pretrained Transformer models with efficient linearized attention mechanisms and advanced memory management. TPTT employs techniques such as Memory as Gate (MaG) and mixed linearized attention (LiZA). It is fully compatible with the Hugging Face Transformers library, enabling seamless adaptation of any causal LLM through parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) without full retraining. We show the effectiveness of TPTT on the MMLU benchmark with models of approximately 1 billion parameters, observing substantial improvements in both efficiency and accuracy. For instance, Titans-Llama-3.2-1B achieves a 20% increase in Exact Match (EM) over its baseline. Statistical analyses and comparisons with recent state-of-the-art methods confirm the practical scalability and robustness of TPTT. Code is available at https://github.com/fabienfrfr/tptt . Python package at https://pypi.org/project/tptt/ .
Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning
Our quality audit for three widely used public multilingual speech datasets - Mozilla Common Voice 17.0, FLEURS, and VoxPopuli - shows that in some languages, these datasets suffer from significant quality issues. We believe addressing these issues will make these datasets more useful as training and evaluation sets, and improve downstream models. We divide these quality issues into two categories: micro-level and macro-level. We find that macro-level issues are more prevalent in less institutionalized, often under-resourced languages. We provide a case analysis of Taiwanese Southern Min (nan_tw) that highlights the need for proactive language planning (e.g. orthography prescriptions, dialect boundary definition) and enhanced data quality control in the process of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset creation. We conclude by proposing guidelines and recommendations to mitigate these issues in future dataset development, emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic awareness in creating robust and reliable speech data resources.
The Evolution of Natural Language Processing: How Prompt Optimization and Language Models are Shaping the Future
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by automating traditional labor-intensive tasks and consequently accelerated the development of computer-aided applications. As researchers continue to advance this field with the introduction of novel language models and more efficient training/finetuning methodologies, the idea of prompt engineering and subsequent optimization strategies with LLMs has emerged as a particularly impactful trend to yield a substantial performance boost across diverse NLP tasks. To best of our knowledge numerous review articles have explored prompt engineering, however, a critical gap exists in comprehensive analyses of prompt optimization strategies. To bridge this gap this paper provides unique and comprehensive insights about the potential of diverse prompt optimization strategies. It analyzes their underlying working paradigms and based on these principles, categorizes them into 11 distinct classes. Moreover, the paper provides details about various NLP tasks where these prompt optimization strategies have been employed, along with details of different LLMs and benchmark datasets used for evaluation. This comprehensive compilation lays a robust foundation for future comparative studies and enables rigorous assessment of prompt optimization and LLM-based predictive pipelines under consistent experimental settings: a critical need in the current landscape. Ultimately, this research will centralize diverse strategic knowledge to facilitate the adaptation of existing prompt optimization strategies for development of innovative predictors across unexplored tasks.
Multilingual Tokenization through the Lens of Indian Languages: Challenges and Insights
Tokenization plays a pivotal role in multilingual NLP. However, existing tokenizers are often skewed towards high-resource languages, limiting their effectiveness for linguistically diverse and morphologically rich languages such as those in the Indian subcontinent. This paper presents a comprehensive intrinsic evaluation of tokenization strategies across 17 Indian languages. We quantify the trade-offs between bottom-up and top-down tokenizer algorithms (BPE and Unigram LM), effects of vocabulary sizes, and compare strategies of multilingual vocabulary construction such as joint and cluster-based training. We also show that extremely low-resource languages can benefit from tokenizers trained on related high-resource languages. Our study provides practical insights for building more fair, efficient, and linguistically informed tokenizers for multilingual NLP.
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