LLM-powered Data Augmentation for Enhanced Cross-lingual Performance

Chenxi Whitehouse, Monojit Choudhury, Alham Aji


Abstract
This paper explores the potential of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation in multilingual commonsense reasoning datasets where the available training data is extremely limited. To achieve this, we utilise several LLMs, namely Dolly-v2, StableVicuna, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, to augment three datasets: XCOPA, XWinograd, and XStoryCloze. Subsequently, we evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning smaller multilingual models, mBERT and XLMR, using the synthesised data. We compare the performance of training with data generated in English and target languages, as well as translated English-generated data, revealing the overall advantages of incorporating data generated by LLMs, e.g. a notable 13.4 accuracy score improvement for the best case. Furthermore, we conduct a human evaluation by asking native speakers to assess the naturalness and logical coherence of the generated examples across different languages. The results of the evaluation indicate that LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 excel at producing natural and coherent text in most languages, however, they struggle to generate meaningful text in certain languages like Tamil. We also observe that ChatGPT falls short in generating plausible alternatives compared to the original dataset, whereas examples from GPT-4 exhibit competitive logical consistency.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
671–686
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.44
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.44
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chenxi Whitehouse, Monojit Choudhury, and Alham Aji. 2023. LLM-powered Data Augmentation for Enhanced Cross-lingual Performance. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 671–686, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-powered Data Augmentation for Enhanced Cross-lingual Performance (Whitehouse et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.44.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.44.mp4