X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions

Chong Li, Wen Yang, Jiajun Zhang, Jinliang Lu, Shaonan Wang, Chengqing Zong


Abstract
Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English samples into these languages can be a solution but unreliable, leading to responses with translation errors and lacking language-specific or cultural knowledge. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages. Specifically, the language model first learns to generate appropriate English instructions according to the natural web texts in other languages as responses. The candidate cross-lingual instruction tuning samples are further refined and diversified. We have employed this method to build a large-scale cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset on 10 languages, namely X-Instruction. The instruction data built using our method incorporate more language-specific knowledge compared with the naive translation method. Experimental results have shown that the response quality of the model tuned on X-Instruction greatly exceeds the model distilled from a powerful teacher model, reaching or even surpassing the ones of ChatGPT. In addition, we find that models tuned on cross-lingual instruction following samples can follow the instruction in the output language without further tuning.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.30
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
546–566
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chong Li, Wen Yang, Jiajun Zhang, Jinliang Lu, Shaonan Wang, and Chengqing Zong. 2024. X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 546–566, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions (Li et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.30.pdf