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

Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Mahani Aljunied, Shafiq Joty, Lidong Bing


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.192
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3501–3516
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.192
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.192
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Mahani Aljunied, Shafiq Joty, and Lidong Bing. 2024. Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3501–3516, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts (Nguyen et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.192.pdf