arXiv subjects

Partha Talukdar

Publications and source records attributed to Partha Talukdar.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

VAANI: Capturing the language landscape for an inclusive digital India

Voice based technologies have the potential to bridge digital accessibility gaps; however, existing datasets fail to capture the linguistic and regional diversity of Indic languages. We present Project VAANI, a large scale multimodal dataset designed to represent India's linguistic landscape across 165 districts. Speech data is collected using image based prompts to elicit spontaneous responses, while images are curated through a separate pipeline covering diverse themes across regions. The dataset undergoes a rigorous multi stage quality control process, combining automated and manual evaluation to ensure high audio quality and transcription accuracy. We release approximately 289K images, 31,255 hours of speech, and 2,043 hours of transcribed audio spanning 105 languages from 28 states and 3 union territories. Many of these languages are represented at this scale for the first time, making VAANI a foundational resource for inclusive speech technology. The dataset enables the development of robust, multilingual, and multimodal models, and supports research in speech recognition, language understanding, and cross-modal learning for underrepresented languages.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SMOL: Professionally translated parallel data for 115 under-represented languages

We open-source SMOL (Set of Maximal Overall Leverage), a suite of training data to unlock machine translation for low-resource languages. SMOL has been translated into 124 (and growing) under-resourced languages (125 language pairs), including many for which there exist no previous public resources, for a total of 6.1M translated tokens. SMOL comprises two sub-datasets, each carefully chosen for maximum impact given its size: SMOLSENT, a set of sentences chosen for broad unique token coverage, and SMOLDOC, a document-level resource focusing on a broad topic coverage. They join the already released GATITOS for a trifecta of paragraph, sentence, and token-level content. We demonstrate that using SMOL to prompt or fine-tune Large Language Models yields robust chrF improvements. In addition to translation, we provide factuality ratings and rationales for all documents in SMOLDOC, yielding the first factuality datasets for most of these languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

IndicGenBench: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Generation Capabilities of LLMs on Indic Languages

As large language models (LLMs) see increasing adoption across the globe, it is imperative for LLMs to be representative of the linguistic diversity of the world. India is a linguistically diverse country of 1.4 Billion people. To facilitate research on multilingual LLM evaluation, we release IndicGenBench - the largest benchmark for evaluating LLMs on user-facing generation tasks across a diverse set 29 of Indic languages covering 13 scripts and 4 language families. IndicGenBench is composed of diverse generation tasks like cross-lingual summarization, machine translation, and cross-lingual question answering. IndicGenBench extends existing benchmarks to many Indic languages through human curation providing multi-way parallel evaluation data for many under-represented Indic languages for the first time. We evaluate a wide range of proprietary and open-source LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM-2, mT5, Gemma, BLOOM and LLaMA on IndicGenBench in a variety of settings. The largest PaLM-2 models performs the best on most tasks, however, there is a significant performance gap in all languages compared to English showing that further research is needed for the development of more inclusive multilingual language models. IndicGenBench is released at www.github.com/google-research-datasets/indic-gen-bench

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

LLM Augmented LLMs: Expanding Capabilities through Composition

Foundational models with billions of parameters which have been trained on large corpora of data have demonstrated non-trivial skills in a variety of domains. However, due to their monolithic structure, it is challenging and expensive to augment them or impart new skills. On the other hand, due to their adaptation abilities, several new instances of these models are being trained towards new domains and tasks. In this work, we study the problem of efficient and practical composition of existing foundation models with more specific models to enable newer capabilities. To this end, we propose CALM -- Composition to Augment Language Models -- which introduces cross-attention between models to compose their representations and enable new capabilities. Salient features of CALM are: (i) Scales up LLMs on new tasks by 're-using' existing LLMs along with a few additional parameters and data, (ii) Existing model weights are kept intact, and hence preserves existing capabilities, and (iii) Applies to diverse domains and settings. We illustrate that augmenting PaLM2-S with a smaller model trained on low-resource languages results in an absolute improvement of up to 13\% on tasks like translation into English and arithmetic reasoning for low-resource languages. Similarly, when PaLM2-S is augmented with a code-specific model, we see a relative improvement of 40\% over the base model for code generation and explanation tasks -- on-par with fully fine-tuned counterparts.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training

Language Models (LMs) pre-trained with self-supervision on large text corpora have become the default starting point for developing models for various NLP tasks. Once the pre-training corpus has been assembled, all data samples in the corpus are treated with equal importance during LM pre-training. However, due to varying levels of relevance and quality of data, equal importance to all the data samples may not be the optimal choice. While data reweighting has been explored in the context of task-specific supervised learning and LM fine-tuning, model-driven reweighting for pre-training data has not been explored. We fill this important gap and propose PRESENCE, a method for jointly reweighting samples by leveraging self-influence (SI) scores as an indicator of sample importance and pre-training. PRESENCE promotes novelty and stability for model pre-training. Through extensive analysis spanning multiple model sizes, datasets, and tasks, we present PRESENCE as an important first step in the research direction of sample reweighting for pre-training language models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Multimodal Modeling For Spoken Language Identification

Spoken language identification refers to the task of automatically predicting the spoken language in a given utterance. Conventionally, it is modeled as a speech-based language identification task. Prior techniques have been constrained to a single modality; however in the case of video data there is a wealth of other metadata that may be beneficial for this task. In this work, we propose MuSeLI, a Multimodal Spoken Language Identification method, which delves into the use of various metadata sources to enhance language identification. Our study reveals that metadata such as video title, description and geographic location provide substantial information to identify the spoken language of the multimedia recording. We conduct experiments using two diverse public datasets of YouTube videos, and obtain state-of-the-art results on the language identification task. We additionally conduct an ablation study that describes the distinct contribution of each modality for language recognition.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Label Aware Speech Representation Learning For Language Identification

Speech representation learning approaches for non-semantic tasks such as language recognition have either explored supervised embedding extraction methods using a classifier model or self-supervised representation learning approaches using raw data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of combining self-supervised representation learning with the language label information for the pre-training task. This framework, termed as Label Aware Speech Representation (LASR) learning, uses a triplet based objective function to incorporate language labels along with the self-supervised loss function. The speech representations are further fine-tuned for the downstream task. The language recognition experiments are performed on two public datasets - FLEURS and Dhwani. In these experiments, we illustrate that the proposed LASR framework improves over the state-of-the-art systems on language identification. We also report an analysis of the robustness of LASR approach to noisy/missing labels as well as its application to multi-lingual speech recognition tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) -- languages for which NLP re-search is particularly far behind in meeting user needs -- it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks -- tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text-only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text),supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Salient Span Masking for Temporal Understanding

Salient Span Masking (SSM) has shown itself to be an effective strategy to improve closed-book question answering performance. SSM extends general masked language model pretraining by creating additional unsupervised training sentences that mask a single entity or date span, thus oversampling factual information. Despite the success of this paradigm, the span types and sampling strategies are relatively arbitrary and not widely studied for other tasks. Thus, we investigate SSM from the perspective of temporal tasks, where learning a good representation of various temporal expressions is important. To that end, we introduce Temporal Span Masking (TSM) intermediate training. First, we find that SSM alone improves the downstream performance on three temporal tasks by an avg. +5.8 points. Further, we are able to achieve additional improvements (avg. +0.29 points) by adding the TSM task. These comprise the new best reported results on the targeted tasks. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of SSM stems from the sentences chosen in the training data rather than the mask choice: sentences with entities frequently also contain temporal expressions. Nonetheless, the additional targeted spans of TSM can still improve performance, especially in a zero-shot context.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Bootstrapping Multilingual Semantic Parsers using Large Language Models

Despite cross-lingual generalization demonstrated by pre-trained multilingual models, the translate-train paradigm of transferring English datasets across multiple languages remains to be a key mechanism for training task-specific multilingual models. However, for many low-resource languages, the availability of a reliable translation service entails significant amounts of costly human-annotated translation pairs. Further, translation services may continue to be brittle due to domain mismatch between task-specific input text and general-purpose text used for training translation models. For multilingual semantic parsing, we demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility offered by large language models (LLMs) for translating English datasets into several languages via few-shot prompting. Through extensive comparisons on two public datasets, MTOP and MASSIVE, spanning 50 languages and several domains, we show that our method of translating data using LLMs outperforms a strong translate-train baseline on 41 out of 50 languages. We study the key design choices that enable more effective multilingual data translation via prompted LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Potential energy surface prediction of Alumina polymorphs using graph neural network

The process of design and discovery of new materials can be significantly expedited and simplified if we can learn effectively from available data. Deep learning (DL) approaches have recently received a lot of interest for their ability to speed up the design of novel materials by predicting material properties with precision close to experiments and ab-initio calculations. The application of deep learning to predict materials properties measured by experiments are valuable yet challenging due to the limited amount of experimental data. Most of the existing approaches to predict properties from computational data have also been directed towards specific material properties. In this work, we extend this approach, by proposing Landscape Crystal Graph Convolution Network(LCGCN), an accurate and transferable deep learning framework based on graph convolutional networks. LCGCN directly learns the potential energy surface (PES) from atomic configurations. This approach can enable transferable models that can predict different material properties. We apply this framework to bulk crystals (i.e. Al2O3), and test it by calculating potential energy surfaces at different temperatures and across different phases of crystal.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

Re-contextualizing Fairness in NLP: The Case of India

Recent research has revealed undesirable biases in NLP data and models. However, these efforts focus on social disparities in West, and are not directly portable to other geo-cultural contexts. In this paper, we focus on NLP fair-ness in the context of India. We start with a brief account of the prominent axes of social disparities in India. We build resources for fairness evaluation in the Indian context and use them to demonstrate prediction biases along some of the axes. We then delve deeper into social stereotypes for Region andReligion, demonstrating its prevalence in corpora and models. Finally, we outline a holistic research agenda to re-contextualize NLP fairness research for the Indian context, ac-counting for Indian societal context, bridging technological gaps in NLP capabilities and re-sources, and adapting to Indian cultural values. While we focus on India, this framework can be generalized to other geo-cultural contexts.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Cultural Re-contextualization of Fairness Research in Language Technologies in India

Recent research has revealed undesirable biases in NLP data and models. However, these efforts largely focus on social disparities in the West, and are not directly portable to other geo-cultural contexts. In this position paper, we outline a holistic research agenda to re-contextualize NLP fairness research for the Indian context, accounting for Indian societal context, bridging technological gaps in capability and resources, and adapting to Indian cultural values. We also summarize findings from an empirical study on various social biases along different axes of disparities relevant to India, demonstrating their prevalence in corpora and models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

UGIF: UI Grounded Instruction Following

Smartphone users often find it difficult to navigate myriad menus to perform common tasks such as "How to block calls from unknown numbers?". Currently, help documents with step-by-step instructions are manually written to aid the user. The user experience can be further enhanced by grounding the instructions in the help document to the UI and overlaying a tutorial on the phone UI. To build such tutorials, several natural language processing components including retrieval, parsing, and grounding are necessary, but there isn't any relevant dataset for such a task. Thus, we introduce UGIF-DataSet, a multi-lingual, multi-modal UI grounded dataset for step-by-step task completion on the smartphone containing 4,184 tasks across 8 languages. As an initial approach to this problem, we propose retrieving the relevant instruction steps based on the user's query and parsing the steps using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate macros that can be executed on-device. The instruction steps are often available only in English, so the challenge includes cross-modal, cross-lingual retrieval of English how-to pages from user queries in many languages and mapping English instruction steps to UI in a potentially different language. We compare the performance of different LLMs including PaLM and GPT-3 and find that the end-to-end task completion rate is 48% for English UI but the performance drops to 32% for other languages. We analyze the common failure modes of existing models on this task and point out areas for improvement.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

TwiRGCN: Temporally Weighted Graph Convolution for Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Recent years have witnessed much interest in temporal reasoning over knowledge graphs (KG) for complex question answering (QA), but there remains a substantial gap in human capabilities. We explore how to generalize relational graph convolutional networks (RGCN) for temporal KGQA. Specifically, we propose a novel, intuitive and interpretable scheme to modulate the messages passed through a KG edge during convolution, based on the relevance of its associated time period to the question. We also introduce a gating device to predict if the answer to a complex temporal question is likely to be a KG entity or time and use this prediction to guide our scoring mechanism. We evaluate the resulting system, which we call TwiRGCN, on TimeQuestions, a recently released, challenging dataset for multi-hop complex temporal QA. We show that TwiRGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems on this dataset across diverse question types. Notably, TwiRGCN improves accuracy by 9--10 percentage points for the most difficult ordinal and implicit question types.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Parameter-Efficient Finetuning for Robust Continual Multilingual Learning

We introduce and study the problem of Continual Multilingual Learning (CML) where a previously trained multilingual model is periodically updated using new data arriving in stages. If the new data is present only in a subset of languages, we find that the resulting model shows improved performance only on the languages included in the latest update (and a few closely related languages) while its performance on all the remaining languages degrade significantly. We address this challenge by proposing LAFT-URIEL, a parameter-efficient finetuning strategy which aims to increase the number of languages on which the model improves after an update, while reducing the magnitude of loss in performance for the remaining languages. LAFT-URIEL uses linguistic knowledge to balance overfitting and knowledge sharing across languages, allowing for an additional 25% of task languages to see an improvement in performance after an update, while also reducing the average magnitude of losses on the remaining languages by 78% relative.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Evaluating the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of NLP Technology: A Case Study for Indian Languages

In order for NLP technology to be widely applicable, fair, and useful, it needs to serve a diverse set of speakers across the world's languages, be equitable, i.e., not unduly biased towards any particular language, and be inclusive of all users, particularly in low-resource settings where compute constraints are common. In this paper, we propose an evaluation paradigm that assesses NLP technologies across all three dimensions. While diversity and inclusion have received attention in recent literature, equity is currently unexplored. We propose to address this gap using the Gini coefficient, a well-established metric used for estimating societal wealth inequality. Using our paradigm, we highlight the distressed state of current technologies for Indian (IN) languages (a linguistically large and diverse set, with a varied speaker population), across all three dimensions. To improve upon these metrics, we demonstrate the importance of region-specific choices in model building and dataset creation, and more importantly, propose a novel, generalisable approach to optimal resource allocation during fine-tuning. Finally, we discuss steps to mitigate these biases and encourage the community to employ multi-faceted evaluation when building linguistically diverse and equitable technologies.

cs.CL↗