Abstract
Understanding how styles differ across languages is advantageous for training both humans and computers to generate culturally appropriate text. We introduce an explanation framework to extract stylistic differences from multilingual LMs and compare styles across languages. Our framework (1) generates comprehensive style lexica in any language and (2) consolidates feature importances from LMs into comparable lexical categories. We apply this framework to compare politeness, creating the first holistic multilingual politeness dataset and exploring how politeness varies across four languages. Our approach enables an effective evaluation of how distinct linguistic categories contribute to stylistic variations and provides interpretable insights into how people communicate differently around the world.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.419
- 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:
- 6775–6791
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.419
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.419
- Cite (ACL):
- Shreya Havaldar, Matthew Pressimone, Eric Wong, and Lyle Ungar. 2023. Comparing Styles across Languages. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6775–6791, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Comparing Styles across Languages (Havaldar et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-05/2023.emnlp-main.419.pdf