Token free approaches have been successfully applied to a series of word and span level tasks. In this work, we compare a byte-level (ByT5) and a wordpiece based (mT5) sequence to sequence model on the 51 languages of the MASSIVE multilingual semantic parsing dataset. We examine multiple experimental settings: (i) zero-shot, (ii) full gold data and (iii) zero-shot with synthetic data. By leveraging a state-of-the-art label projection method for machine translated examples, we are able to reduce the gap in exact match accuracy to only 5 points with respect to a model trained on gold data from all the languages. We additionally provide insights on the cross-lingual transfer of ByT5 and show how the model compares with respect to mT5 across all parameter sizes.

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), the creation of multilingual NLU systems remains a challenge. It is common to have NLU systems limited to a subset of languages due to lack of available data. They also often vary widely in performance. We launch a three-phase approach to address the limitations in NLU and help propel NLU technology to new heights. We release a 52 language dataset called the Multilingual Amazon SLU resource package (SLURP) for Slot-filling, Intent classification, and Virtual assistant Evaluation, or MASSIVE, in an effort to address parallel data availability for voice assistants. We organize the Massively Multilingual NLU 2022 Challenge to provide a competitive environment and push the state-of-the art in the transferability of models into other languages. Finally, we host the first Massively Multilingual NLU workshop which brings these components together. The MMNLU workshop seeks to advance the science behind multilingual NLU by providing a platform for the presentation of new research in the field and connecting teams working on this research direction. This paper summarizes the dataset, workshop and the competition and the findings of each phase.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world's languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user's goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders (XTREME) benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks. We demonstrate that while models tested on English reach human performance on many tasks, there is still a sizable gap in the performance of cross-lingually transferred models, particularly on syntactic and sentence retrieval tasks. There is also a wide spread of results across languages. We release the benchmark 1 to encourage research on cross-lingual learning methods that transfer linguistic knowledge across a diverse and representative set of languages and tasks.

我们介绍了用于插槽，意图分类和虚拟助手评估的大规模数据集 - 数字亚马逊SLU资源包（SLURP）。大规模包含1M现实，平行，标记为虚拟助手的话语，涵盖51种语言，18个域，60个意图和55个插槽。通过任务专业翻译人员将仅英文slurp数据集定位为29属的50种类型多样性的语言来创建大规模。我们还介绍了XLM-R和MT5上的建模结果，包括精确的匹配精度，意图分类精度和插槽填充F1分数。我们已经公开发布了数据集，建模代码和模型。

我们提出语言学家，这是一种通过微调Alexatm 5B生成带注释数据的方法，用于生成意图分类和插槽标记（IC+ST），这是一种5亿参数的多语言序列到序列（SEQ2SEQ）模型，在灵活的指令上迅速的。在SNIP数据集的10次新颖意图设置中，语言学家超过了最新的方法（反向翻译和示例外推），可以通过宽阔的边距，显示出IC回忆中+1.9点的目标意图的绝对改善ST F1分数和+2.5分。在MATIS ++数据集的零击跨语言设置中，语言学家表现出强大的机器翻译基线，插槽对齐的基线是+4.14的+4.14点在6个语言上绝对在ST F1分数上，同时在IC上匹配IC的性能。最后，我们在用于对话代理IC+ST的内部大规模多语言数据集上验证了我们的结果，并显示了使用背面翻译，释义和插槽目录重新采样采样的基线的显着改进。据我们所知，我们是第一个展示大规模SEQ2SEQ模型的指导微调的人，以控制多语言意图和插槽标记的数据生成的输出。

Modern virtual assistants use internal semantic parsing engines to convert user utterances to actionable commands. However, prior work has demonstrated that semantic parsing is a difficult multilingual transfer task with low transfer efficiency compared to other tasks. In global markets such as India and Latin America, this is a critical issue as switching between languages is prevalent for bilingual users. In this work we dramatically improve the zero-shot performance of a multilingual and codeswitched semantic parsing system using two stages of multilingual alignment. First, we show that constrastive alignment pretraining improves both English performance and transfer efficiency. We then introduce a constrained optimization approach for hyperparameter-free adversarial alignment during finetuning. Our Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser (DAMP) improves mBERT transfer performance by 3x, 6x, and 81x on the Spanglish, Hinglish and Multilingual Task Oriented Parsing benchmarks respectively and outperforms XLM-R and mT5-Large using 3.2x fewer parameters.

一种有效的横向传输方法是在一种语言中微调在监督数据集上的双语或多语言模型，并以零拍方式在另一种语言上进行评估。在培训时间或推理时间翻译例子也是可行的替代方案。然而，存在与文献中很少有关的这些方法相关的成本。在这项工作中，我们在其有效性（例如，准确性），开发和部署成本方面分析交叉语言方法，以及推理时间的延迟。我们的三个任务的实验表明最好的交叉方法是高度任务依赖性的。最后，通过结合零射和翻译方法，我们在这项工作中使用的三个数据集中实现了最先进的。基于这些结果，我们对目标语言手动标记的培训数据有所了解。代码和翻译的数据集可在https://github.com/unicamp-dl/cross-lingsual-analysis上获得

通常观察到的最先进的自然语言技术问题，例如亚马逊alexa和苹果公司，是他们的服务不会因语言障碍而扩展到大多数发展中国家的公民。这种种群因其语言缺乏可用资源来构建NLP产品。本文介绍了allwoz，一个多语言多域面向任务的客户服务对话框数据集覆盖八种语言：英语，普通话，韩语，越南语，印地语，法国，葡萄牙语和泰国。此外，我们通过使用mt5与元学习来创建多语言数据集的基准。

Translating training data into many languages has emerged as a practical solution for improving cross-lingual transfer. For tasks that involve span-level annotations, such as information extraction or question answering, an additional label projection step is required to map annotated spans onto the translated texts. Recently, a few efforts have utilized a simple mark-then-translate method to jointly perform translation and projection by inserting special markers around the labeled spans in the original sentence. However, as far as we are aware, no empirical analysis has been conducted on how this approach compares to traditional annotation projection based on word alignment. In this paper, we present an extensive empirical study across 42 languages and three tasks (QA, NER, and Event Extraction) to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of both methods, filling an important gap in the literature. Experimental results show that our optimized version of mark-then-translate, which we call EasyProject, is easily applied to many languages and works surprisingly well, outperforming the more complex word alignment-based methods. We analyze several key factors that affect end-task performance, and show EasyProject works well because it can accurately preserve label span boundaries after translation. We will publicly release all our code and data.

有监督的基于深度学习的方法已应用于以任务为导向的对话框，并在有足够数量的培训示例可用时对有限的域和语言应用有效。在实践中，这些方法遭受了域驱动设计和资源不足的语言的缺点。域和语言模型应该随着问题空间的发展而增长和变化。一方面，对转移学习的研究证明了基于多语言变压器模型学习语义丰富的表示的跨语性能力。另一方面，除了上述方法之外，元学习还能够开发任务和语言学习算法，能够实现泛滥。在这种情况下，本文提出了使用典型的神经网络和基于多语言变压器的模型来研究使用协同进行几次学习的跨语性可传递性。自然语言的实验理解多亚提斯++语料库的任务表明，我们的方法基本上改善了低资源和高资源语言之间观察到的转移学习表现。更普遍地说，我们的方法证实，可以将具有特定语言的有意义的潜在空间推广到使用元学习的情况下看不见和资源不足的潜在空间。

发展任务导向的对话助理的实用需求需要了解许多语言。多语言自然语言理解（NLU）的新型基准包括多种语言中的单声道句，用意图和插槽注释。在这种设置模型中，用于交叉传输在联合意图识别和槽填充方面表现出显着性能。然而，现有的基准缺乏代码切换话语，这难以收集和标签由于语法结构的复杂性。对于NLU模型的评估似乎偏见和有限，因为代码切换被遗漏了范围。我们的工作采用认可的方法来生成合理的和自然探测的代码切换话语，并使用它们来创建合成代码交换测试集。基于实验，我们报告说，最先进的NLU模型无法处理代码切换。在最糟糕的是，性能，通过语义精度评估，从横跨80 \％的8 \％的低至15 \％。此外，我们展示了，对合成码混合数据进行预训练有助于在具有单晶体数据的可比水平上保持所提出的测试中的性能。最后，我们分析了不同的语言对并表明语言越近，NLU模型越好地处理了交替。这符合对多语种模型在语言之间进行转移的共同理解

MARCO排名数据集已广泛用于培训IR任务的深度学习模型，在不同的零射击方案上实现了相当大的效果。但是，这种类型的资源是英语以外的语言的稀缺。在这项工作中，我们呈现MMARCO，MS Marco段落的多语言版本，该数据集包括使用机器翻译创建的13种语言。我们通过微调单语和多语言重新排名模型以及此数据集的密集多语言模型进行了评估。实验结果表明，在我们翻译的数据集上微调微调的多语言模型可以单独对原始英文版的模型进行微调的卓越效果。我们蒸馏的多语言RE-RANKER与非蒸馏模型具有竞争力，而参数较少的5.4倍。最后，我们展现了翻译质量和检索效果之间的正相关性，提供了证据，即翻译方法的改进可能导致多语言信息检索的改进。翻译的数据集和微调模型可在https://github.com/unicamp-dl/mmarco.git上获得。

In this work, we introduce IndicXTREME, a benchmark consisting of nine diverse tasks covering 18 languages from the Indic sub-continent belonging to four different families. Across languages and tasks, IndicXTREME contains a total of 103 evaluation sets, of which 51 are new contributions to the literature. To maintain high quality, we only use human annotators to curate or translate\footnote{for IndicXParaphrase, where an automatic translation system is used, a second human verification and correction step is done.} our datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort toward creating a standard benchmark for Indic languages that aims to test the zero-shot capabilities of pretrained language models. We also release IndicCorp v2, an updated and much larger version of IndicCorp that contains 20.9 billion tokens in 24 languages. We pretrain IndicBERT v2 on IndicCorp v2 and evaluate it on IndicXTREME to show that it outperforms existing multilingual language models such as XLM-R and MuRIL.

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in crosslingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 15 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.

In the absence of readily available labeled data for a given task and language, annotation projection has been proposed as one of the possible strategies to automatically generate annotated data which may then be used to train supervised systems. Annotation projection has often been formulated as the task of projecting, on parallel corpora, some labels from a source into a target language. In this paper we present T-Projection, a new approach for annotation projection that leverages large pretrained text2text language models and state-of-the-art machine translation technology. T-Projection decomposes the label projection task into two subtasks: (i) The candidate generation step, in which a set of projection candidates using a multilingual T5 model is generated and, (ii) the candidate selection step, in which the candidates are ranked based on translation probabilities. We evaluate our method in three downstream tasks and five different languages. Our results show that T-projection improves the average F1 score of previous methods by more than 8 points.

我们考虑使用最新的MultieRlex数据集中考虑法律主题分类中的零射击跨语性转移。由于原始数据集包含并行文档，这对于零拍传输不现实是不现实的，因此我们开发了一个没有并行文档的数据集的新版本。我们使用它来表明，基于翻译的方法非常优于多绘制预训练的模型，这是多曲线的最佳先前的零弹性传输方法。我们还开发了一种双语的教师零摄像转移方法，该方法利用了目标语言的其他未标记文档，并且比直接在标记的目标语言文档上进行微调的模型更好。

Automatic machine translation (MT) metrics are widely used to distinguish the translation qualities of machine translation systems across relatively large test sets (system-level evaluation). However, it is unclear if automatic metrics are reliable at distinguishing good translations from bad translations at the sentence level (segment-level evaluation). In this paper, we investigate how useful MT metrics are at detecting the success of a machine translation component when placed in a larger platform with a downstream task. We evaluate the segment-level performance of the most widely used MT metrics (chrF, COMET, BERTScore, etc.) on three downstream cross-lingual tasks (dialogue state tracking, question answering, and semantic parsing). For each task, we only have access to a monolingual task-specific model. We calculate the correlation between the metric's ability to predict a good/bad translation with the success/failure on the final task for the Translate-Test setup. Our experiments demonstrate that all metrics exhibit negligible correlation with the extrinsic evaluation of the downstream outcomes. We also find that the scores provided by neural metrics are not interpretable mostly because of undefined ranges. Our analysis suggests that future MT metrics be designed to produce error labels rather than scores to facilitate extrinsic evaluation.

We present, Naamapadam, the largest publicly available Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset for the 11 major Indian languages from two language families. In each language, it contains more than 400k sentences annotated with a total of at least 100k entities from three standard entity categories (Person, Location and Organization) for 9 out of the 11 languages. The training dataset has been automatically created from the Samanantar parallel corpus by projecting automatically tagged entities from an English sentence to the corresponding Indian language sentence. We also create manually annotated testsets for 8 languages containing approximately 1000 sentences per language. We demonstrate the utility of the obtained dataset on existing testsets and the Naamapadam-test data for 8 Indic languages. We also release IndicNER, a multilingual mBERT model fine-tuned on the Naamapadam training set. IndicNER achieves the best F1 on the Naamapadam-test set compared to an mBERT model fine-tuned on existing datasets. IndicNER achieves an F1 score of more than 80 for 7 out of 11 Indic languages. The dataset and models are available under open-source licenses at https://ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/naamapadam.

现有的多方对话数据集用于核心分辨率是新生的，许多挑战仍然没有解决。我们根据电视成绩单为此任务创建了一个大规模数据集，多语言多方CoreF（MMC）。由于使用多种语言的黄金质量字幕可用，我们建议重复注释以通过注释投影以其他语言（中文和Farsi）创建银色核心数据。在黄金（英语）数据上，现成的模型在MMC上的性能相对较差，这表明MMC比以前的数据集更广泛地覆盖多方核心。在银数据上，我们发现成功使用它进行数据增强和从头开始训练，这有效地模拟了零击的跨语性设置。