David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Biography

David Adelani is an assistant professor at McGill University’s School of Computer Science under the Fighting Inequities initiative, and a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Adelani’s research focuses on multilingual natural language processing with special attention to under-resourced languages.

Current Students

Jonah Dauvet

Research Intern - McGill University

Senyu Li Li

PhD - McGill University

Sifan Liu

Research Intern - McGill University

Jessica Ojo

Master's Research - McGill University

Fabian Schmidt

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Website

Vivek Verma

Professional Master's - Université de Montréal

tianyi.xu2@mail.mcgill.ca

Tianyi Xu Xu

Research Intern - McGill University

Peter Yu

Master's Research - McGill University

Website

Publications

Machine Translation Hallucination Detection for Low and High Resource Languages using Large Language Models

Kenza Benkirane

Laura Gongas

Shahar Pelles

Naomi Fuchs

Joshua Darmon

Pontus Stenetorp

Eduardo Sánchez

Meta

Recent advancements in massively multilingual machine translation systems have significantly enhanced translation accuracy; however, even th… (see more)e best performing systems still generate hallucinations, severely impacting user trust. Detecting hallucinations in Machine Translation (MT) remains a critical challenge, particularly since existing methods excel with High-Resource Languages (HRLs) but exhibit substantial limitations when applied to Low-Resource Languages (LRLs). This paper evaluates sentence-level hallucination detection approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) and semantic similarity within massively multilingual embeddings. Our study spans 16 language directions, covering HRLs, LRLs, with diverse scripts. We find that the choice of model is essential for performance. On average, for HRLs, Llama3-70B outperforms the previous state of the art by as much as 0.16 MCC (Matthews Correlation Coefficient). However, for LRLs we observe that Claude Sonnet outperforms other LLMs on average by 0.03 MCC. The key takeaway from our study is that LLMs can achieve performance comparable or even better than previously proposed models, despite not being explicitly trained for any machine translation task. However, their advantage is less significant for LRLs.

2024-07-23

ArXiv (preprint)

Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach

Garry Kuwanto

Eno-Abasi Urua

Priscilla A. Amuok

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Aremu Anuoluwapo

Verrah Akinyi Otiende

Loice Emma Nanyanga

T. Nyoike

A. D. Akpan

Nsima Ab Udouboh

Idongesit Udeme Archibong

Idara Effiong Moses

Ifeoluwatayo A. Ige

Benjamin A. Ajibade

Olumide Benjamin Awokoya

Idris Abdulmumin

Saminu Mohammad Aliyu

Ruqayya Nasir Iro

Ibrahim Ahmad

Deontae Smith … (see 4 more)

Praise-EL Michaels

Derry Tanti Wijaya

Anietie U Andy

Low-resource languages often face challenges in acquiring high-quality language data due to the reliance on translation-based methods, which… (see more) can introduce the translationese effect. This phenomenon results in translated sentences that lack fluency and naturalness in the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for data collection by leveraging storyboards to elicit more fluent and natural sentences. Our method involves presenting native speakers with visual stimuli in the form of storyboards and collecting their descriptions without direct exposure to the source text. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing our storyboard-based approach with traditional text translation-based methods in terms of accuracy and fluency. Human annotators and quantitative metrics were used to assess translation quality. The results indicate a preference for text translation in terms of accuracy, while our method demonstrates worse accuracy but better fluency in the language focused.

2024-07-14

ArXiv (preprint)

Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yorùbá Regional Dialects

Orevaoghene Ahia

Aremu Anuoluwapo

Diana Abagyan

Hila Gonen

Daud Abolade

Noah A. Smith

Yulia Tsvetkov

Yoruba—an African language with roughly 47 million speakers—encompasses a continuum with several dialects. Recent efforts to develop NLP… (see more) technologies for African languages have focused on their standard dialects, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are little to no resources or tools. We take steps towards bridging this gap by introducing a new high-quality parallel text and speech corpus; YORULECT across three domains and four regional yoruba dialects. To develop this corpus, we engaged native speakers, traveling to communities where these dialects are spoken, to collect text and speech data. Using our newly created corpus, we conducted extensive experiments on (text) machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and speech-to-text translation. Our results reveal substantial performance disparities between standard yoruba and the other dialects across all tasks. However, we also show that with dialect-adaptive finetuning, we are able to narrow this gap. We believe our dataset and experimental analysis will contribute greatly to developing NLP tools for Yoruba and its dialects, and potentially for other African languages, by improving our understanding of existing challenges and offering a high-quality dataset for further development. We will release YORULECT dataset and models publicly under an open license.

2024-06-27

ArXiv (preprint)

MINERS: Multilingual Language Models as Semantic Retrievers

Genta Indra Winata

Ruochen Zhang

Words have been represented in a high-dimensional vector space that encodes their semantic similarities, enabling downstream applications su… (see more)ch as retrieving synonyms, antonyms, and relevant contexts. However, despite recent advances in multilingual language models (LMs), the effectiveness of these models' representations in semantic retrieval contexts has not been comprehensively explored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the MINERS, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of multilingual LMs in semantic retrieval tasks, including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. We create a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of LMs in retrieving samples across over 200 diverse languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. Our results demonstrate that by solely retrieving semantically similar embeddings yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, without requiring any fine-tuning.

2024-06-11

ArXiv (preprint)

IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models

Jessica Ojo

Israel Abebe Azime

Zhuang Yun Jian

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Xuanli He

Millicent Ochieng

Sara Hooker

Andiswa Bukula

En-Shiun Annie Lee

Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke

Happy Buzaaba

Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda

Godson Kalipe

Jonathan Mukiibi

Salomon Kabongo

Foutse Yuehgoh

M. Setaka

Lolwethu Ndolela

Nkiruka Bridget Odu … (see 6 more)

Rooweither Mabuya

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Salomey Osei

Sokhar Samb

Tadesse Kebede Guge

Pontus Stenetorp

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languag… (see more)es. Additionally, many low-resource languages (\eg African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench -- a human-translated benchmark dataset for 17 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference~(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning~(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based question answering~(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings~(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and six proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages~(such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Gemma 2 27B only at 63\% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. In addition, machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, such as Gemma 2 27B and LLaMa 3.1 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.

2024-06-05

ArXiv (preprint)

IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models

Jessica Ojo

Israel Abebe Azime

Zhuang Yun Jian

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Xuanli He

Millicent Ochieng

Sara Hooker

Andiswa Bukula

En-Shiun Annie Lee

Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke

Happy Buzaaba

Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda

Godson Kalipe

Jonathan Mukiibi

Salomon Kabongo

Foutse Yuehgoh

M. Setaka

Lolwethu Ndolela

Nkiruka Bridget Odu … (see 6 more)

Rooweither Mabuya

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Salomey Osei

Sokhar Samb

Tadesse Kebede Guge

Pontus Stenetorp

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languag… (see more)es. Additionally, many low-resource languages (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench -- a human-translated benchmark dataset for 16 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference~(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning~(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based QA~(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings~(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and four proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages~(such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Aya-101 only at 58\% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. Machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, like LLaMa 3 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.

2024-06-05

ArXiv (preprint)

Meta's AI translation model embraces overlooked languages.

2024-06-05

Nature (published)

Meta's AI translation model embraces overlooked languages.

2024-06-05

Nature (published)

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Jiayi Wang

Sweta Agrawal

Marek Masiak

Ricardo Rei

Eleftheria Briakou

Marine Carpuat

Xuanli He

Sofia Bourhim

Andiswa Bukula

Muhidin A. Mohamed

Temitayo Olatoye

Tosin Adewumi

Hamam Mokayed

Christine Mwase

Wangui Kimotho

Foutse Yuehgoh

Aremu Anuoluwapo

Jessica Ojo

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad … (see 41 more)

Salomey Osei

Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo

Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke

Perez Ogayo

Oumaima Hourrane

Salma El Anigri

Lolwethu Ndolela

Thabiso Mangwana

Shafie Abdi Mohamed

Hassan Ayinde

Ayinde Hassan

Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi

Lama Alkhaled

sana Sabah al-azzawi

Naome Etori

Millicent Ochieng

Clemencia Siro

Samuel Njoroge

Njoroge Kiragu

Eric Muchiri

Wangari Kimotho

Lyse Naomi Wamba

Daud Abolade

Simbiat Ajao

Iyanuoluwa Shode

Ricky Macharm

Ruqayya Nasir Iro

Saheed Salahudeen Abdullahi

Stephen Moore

Bernard Opoku

Zainab Akinjobi

Abeeb Afolabi

Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna

Onyekachi Ogbu

Sam Brian

Sam Ochieng’

Verrah Akinyi Otiende

CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU

Toadoum Sari Sakayo

Yao Lu

Pontus Stenetorp

Despite the recent progress on scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) to several under-resourced African languages, accurately measur… (see more)ing this progress remains challenging, since evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU, which typically show a weaker correlation with human judgments. Learned metrics such as COMET have higher correlation; however, the lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines for error detection and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET: COMET evaluation metrics for African languages by leveraging DA data from well-resourced languages and an African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-R) to create the state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics for African languages with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (0.441).

2024-06-01

Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (published)

Does Generative AI speak Nigerian-Pidgin?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingualism in LLMs

A. Seza Dougruoz

Iyanuoluwa Shode

Aremu Anuoluwapo

2024-04-30

ArXiv (preprint)

Comparing LLM prompting with Cross-lingual transfer performance on Indigenous and Low-resource Brazilian Languages

A. Seza Dougruoz

Andr'e Coneglian

Atul Kr. Ojha

Large Language Models are transforming NLP for a lot of tasks. However, how LLMs perform NLP tasks for LRLs is less explored. In alliance wi… (see more)th the theme track of the NAACL’24, we focus on 12 low-resource languages (LRLs) from Brazil, 2 LRLs from Africa and 2 high-resource languages (HRLs) (e.g., English and Brazilian Portuguese). Our results indicate that the LLMs perform worse for the labeling of LRLs in comparison to HRLs in general. We explain the reasons behind this failure and provide an error analyses through examples from 2 Brazilian LRLs.

2024-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Comparing LLM prompting with Cross-lingual transfer performance on Indigenous and Low-resource Brazilian Languages

A. Seza Dougruoz

Andr'e Coneglian

Atul Kr. Ojha

Large Language Models are transforming NLP for a variety of tasks. However, how LLMs perform NLP tasks for low-resource languages (LRLs) is … (see more)less explored. In line with the goals of the AmericasNLP workshop, we focus on 12 LRLs from Brazil, 2 LRLs from Africa and 2 high-resource languages (HRLs) (e.g., English and Brazilian Portuguese). Our results indicate that the LLMs perform worse for the part of speech (POS) labeling of LRLs in comparison to HRLs. We explain the reasons behind this failure and provide an error analysis through examples observed in our data set.

2024-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)