Jan Christian Blaise Cruz


2023

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Towards Automatic Construction of Filipino WordNet: Word Sense Induction and Synset Induction Using Sentence Embeddings
Dan John Velasco | Axel Alba | Trisha Gail Pelagio | Bryce Anthony Ramirez | Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Unisse Chua | Briane Paul Samson | Charibeth Cheng
Proceedings of the First Workshop in South East Asian Language Processing

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Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers
Ruochen Zhang | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Genta Winata | Alham Fikri Aji
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great capabilities in a wide range of tasks, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance through zero-shot or few-shot prompting methods. While there have been extensive studies on their abilities in monolingual tasks, the investigation of their potential in the context of code-switching (CSW), the practice of alternating languages within an utterance, remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of various multilingual LLMs, benchmarking their performance across four tasks: sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and word-level language identification. Our results indicate that despite multilingual LLMs exhibiting promising outcomes in certain tasks using zero or few-shot prompting, they still underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales. We argue that current “multilingualism’ in LLMs does not inherently imply proficiency with code-switching texts, calling for future research to bridge this discrepancy.

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Current Status of NLP in South East Asia with Insights from Multilingualism and Language Diversity
Alham Fikri Aji | Jessica Zosa Forde | Alyssa Marie Loo | Lintang Sutawika | Skyler Wang | Genta Indra Winata | Zheng-Xin Yong | Ruochen Zhang | A. Seza Doğruöz | Yin Lin Tan | Jan Christian Blaise Cruz
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstract

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Samsung R&D Institute Philippines at WMT 2023
Jan Christian Blaise Cruz
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

In this paper, we describe the constrained submission systems of Samsung R&D Institute Philippines to the WMT 2023 General Translation Task for two directions: en->he and he->en. Our systems comprise of Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence models that are trained with a mix of best practices: comprehensive data preprocessing pipelines, synthetic backtranslated data, and the use of noisy channel reranking during online decoding. Our models perform comparably to, and sometimes outperform, strong baseline unconstrained systems such as mBART50 M2M and NLLB 200 MoE despite having significantly fewer parameters on two public benchmarks: FLORES-200 and NTREX-128.

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Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages
Zheng Xin Yong | Ruochen Zhang | Jessica Forde | Skyler Wang | Arjun Subramonian | Holy Lovenia | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Genta Winata | Lintang Sutawika | Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Yin Lin Tan | Long Phan | Long Phan | Rowena Garcia | Thamar Solorio | Alham Fikri Aji
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

While code-mixing is a common linguistic practice in many parts of the world, collecting high-quality and low-cost code-mixed data remains a challenge for natural language processing (NLP) research. The recent proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) compels one to ask: how capable are these systems in generating code-mixed data? In this paper, we explore prompting multilingual LLMs in a zero-shot manner to generate code-mixed data for seven languages in South East Asia (SEA), namely Indonesian, Malay, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Tamil, and Singlish. We find that publicly available multilingual instruction-tuned models such as BLOOMZ and Flan-T5-XXL are incapable of producing texts with phrases or clauses from different languages. ChatGPT exhibits inconsistent capabilities in generating code-mixed texts, wherein its per-formance varies depending on the prompt template and language pairing. For instance, ChatGPT generates fluent and natural Singlish texts (an English-based creole spoken in Singapore), but for English-Tamil language pair, the system mostly produces grammatically incorrect or semantically meaningless utterances. Furthermore, it may erroneously introduce languages not specified in the prompt. Based on our investigation, existing multilingual LLMs exhibit a wide range of proficiency in code-mixed data generation for SEA languages. As such, we advise against using LLMs in this context without extensive human checks.

2022

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Samsung Research Philippines - Datasaur AI’s Submission for the WMT22 Large Scale Multilingual Translation Task
Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Lintang Sutawika
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper describes the submission of the joint Samsung Research Philippines - Datasaur AI team for the WMT22 Large Scale Multilingual African Translation shared task. We approach the contest as a way to explore task composition as a solution for low-resource multilingual translation, using adapter fusion to combine multiple task adapters that learn subsets of the total translation pairs. Our final model shows performance improvements in 32 out of the 44 translation directions that we participate in when compared to a single model system trained on multiple directions at once.

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Improving Large-scale Language Models and Resources for Filipino
Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Charibeth Cheng
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper, we improve on existing language resources for the low-resource Filipino language in two ways. First, we outline the construction of the TLUnified dataset, a large-scale pretraining corpus that serves as an improvement over smaller existing pretraining datasets for the language in terms of scale and topic variety. Second, we pretrain new Transformer language models following the RoBERTa pretraining technique to supplant existing models trained with small corpora. Our new RoBERTa models show significant improvements over existing Filipino models in three benchmark datasets with an average gain of 4.47% test accuracy across three classification tasks with varying difficulty.

2021

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Data Processing Matters: SRPH-Konvergen AI’s Machine Translation System for WMT’21
Lintang Sutawika | Jan Christian Blaise Cruz
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

In this paper, we describe the submission of the joint Samsung Research Philippines-Konvergen AI team for the WMT’21 Large Scale Multilingual Translation Task - Small Track 2. We submit a standard Seq2Seq Transformer model to the shared task without any training or architecture tricks, relying mainly on the strength of our data preprocessing techniques to boost performance. Our final submission model scored 22.92 average BLEU on the FLORES-101 devtest set, and scored 22.97 average BLEU on the contest’s hidden test set, ranking us sixth overall. Despite using only a standard Transformer, our model ranked first in Indonesian to Javanese, showing that data preprocessing matters equally, if not more, than cutting edge model architectures and training techniques.

2020

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Localization of Fake News Detection via Multitask Transfer Learning
Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Julianne Agatha Tan | Charibeth Cheng
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The use of the internet as a fast medium of spreading fake news reinforces the need for computational tools that combat it. Techniques that train fake news classifiers exist, but they all assume an abundance of resources including large labeled datasets and expert-curated corpora, which low-resource languages may not have. In this work, we make two main contributions: First, we alleviate resource scarcity by constructing the first expertly-curated benchmark dataset for fake news detection in Filipino, which we call “Fake News Filipino.” Second, we benchmark Transfer Learning (TL) techniques and show that they can be used to train robust fake news classifiers from little data, achieving 91% accuracy on our fake news dataset, reducing the error by 14% compared to established few-shot baselines. Furthermore, lifting ideas from multitask learning, we show that augmenting transformer-based transfer techniques with auxiliary language modeling losses improves their performance by adapting to writing style. Using this, we improve TL performance by 4-6%, achieving an accuracy of 96% on our best model. Lastly, we show that our method generalizes well to different types of news articles, including political news, entertainment news, and opinion articles.