Majd Hawasly


2023

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Analyzing Multilingual Competency of LLMs in Multi-Turn Instruction Following: A Case Study of Arabic
Sabri Boughorbel | Majd Hawasly
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023

While significant progress has been made in benchmarking Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation of their abilities in responding to multi-turn instructions in less-commonly tested languages like Arabic. Our paper offers a detailed examination of the proficiency of open LLMs in such scenarios in Arabic. Utilizing a customized Arabic translation of the MT-Bench benchmark suite, we employ GPT-4 as a uniform evaluator for both English and Arabic queries to assess and compare the performance of the LLMs on various open-ended tasks. Our findings reveal variations in model responses on different task categories, e.g., logic vs. literacy, when instructed in English or Arabic. We find that fine-tuned base models using multilingual and multi-turn datasets could be competitive to models trained from scratch on multilingual data. Finally, we hypothesize that an ensemble of small, open LLMs could perform competitively to proprietary LLMs on the benchmark.

2017

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Natural Language Grounding and Grammar Induction for Robotic Manipulation Commands
Muhannad Alomari | Paul Duckworth | Majd Hawasly | David C. Hogg | Anthony G. Cohn
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics

We present a cognitively plausible system capable of acquiring knowledge in language and vision from pairs of short video clips and linguistic descriptions. The aim of this work is to teach a robot manipulator how to execute natural language commands by demonstration. This is achieved by first learning a set of visual ‘concepts’ that abstract the visual feature spaces into concepts that have human-level meaning. Second, learning the mapping/grounding between words and the extracted visual concepts. Third, inducing grammar rules via a semantic representation known as Robot Control Language (RCL). We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised grounding and grammar induction systems, and show that a robot can learn to execute never seen-before commands from pairs of unlabelled linguistic and visual inputs.