Fredrik Carlsson


2024

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GPT-SW3: An Autoregressive Language Model for the Scandinavian Languages
Ariel Ekgren | Amaru Cuba Gyllensten | Felix Stollenwerk | Joey Öhman | Tim Isbister | Evangelia Gogoulou | Fredrik Carlsson | Judit Casademont | Magnus Sahlgren
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

This paper details the process of developing the first native large generative language model for the North Germanic languages, GPT-SW3. We cover all parts of the development process, from data collection and processing, training configuration and instruction finetuning, to evaluation, applications, and considerations for release strategies. We discuss pros and cons of developing large language models for smaller languages and in relatively peripheral regions of the globe, and we hope that this paper can serve as a guide and reference for other researchers that undertake the development of large generative models for smaller languages.

2022

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Fine-Grained Controllable Text Generation Using Non-Residual Prompting
Fredrik Carlsson | Joey Öhman | Fangyu Liu | Severine Verlinden | Joakim Nivre | Magnus Sahlgren
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The introduction of immensely large Causal Language Models (CLMs) has rejuvenated the interest in open-ended text generation. However, controlling the generative process for these Transformer-based models is at large an unsolved problem. Earlier work has explored either plug-and-play decoding strategies, or more powerful but blunt approaches such as prompting. There hence currently exists a trade-off between fine-grained control, and the capability for more expressive high-level instructions. To alleviate this trade-off, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture that enables intermediate text prompts at arbitrary time steps. We propose a resource-efficient method for converting a pre-trained CLM into this architecture, and demonstrate its potential on various experiments, including the novel task of contextualized word inclusion. Our method provides strong results on multiple experimental settings, proving itself to be both expressive and versatile.

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Lessons Learned from GPT-SW3: Building the First Large-Scale Generative Language Model for Swedish
Ariel Ekgren | Amaru Cuba Gyllensten | Evangelia Gogoulou | Alice Heiman | Severine Verlinden | Joey Öhman | Fredrik Carlsson | Magnus Sahlgren
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present GTP-SW3, a 3.5 billion parameter autoregressive language model, trained on a newly created 100 GB Swedish corpus. This paper provides insights with regards to data collection and training, while highlights the challenges of proper model evaluation. The results of quantitive evaluation through perplexity indicate that GPT-SW3 is a competent model in comparison with existing autoregressive models of similar size. Additionally, we perform an extensive prompting study which reveals the good text generation capabilities of GTP-SW3.

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Cross-lingual and Multilingual CLIP
Fredrik Carlsson | Philipp Eisen | Faton Rekathati | Magnus Sahlgren
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The long-standing endeavor of relating the textual and the visual domain recently underwent a pivotal breakthrough, as OpenAI released CLIP. This model distinguishes how well an English text corresponds with a given image with unprecedented accuracy. Trained via a contrastive learning objective over a huge dataset of 400M of images and captions, it is a work that is not easily replicated, especially for low resource languages. Capitalizing on the modularization of the CLIP architecture, we propose to use cross-lingual teacher learning to re-train the textual encoder for various non-English languages. Our method requires no image data and relies entirely on machine translation which removes the need for data in the target language. We find that our method can efficiently train a new textual encoder with relatively low computational cost, whilst still outperforming previous baselines on multilingual image-text retrieval.

2021

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It’s Basically the Same Language Anyway: the Case for a Nordic Language Model
Magnus Sahlgren | Fredrik Carlsson | Fredrik Olsson | Love Börjeson
Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

When is it beneficial for a research community to organize a broader collaborative effort on a topic, and when should we instead promote individual efforts? In this opinion piece, we argue that we are at a stage in the development of large-scale language models where a collaborative effort is desirable, despite the fact that the preconditions for making individual contributions have never been better. We consider a number of arguments for collaboratively developing a large-scale Nordic language model, include environmental considerations, cost, data availability, language typology, cultural similarity, and transparency. Our primary goal is to raise awareness and foster a discussion about our potential impact and responsibility as NLP community.

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Should we Stop Training More Monolingual Models, and Simply Use Machine Translation Instead?
Tim Isbister | Fredrik Carlsson | Magnus Sahlgren
Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Most work in NLP makes the assumption that it is desirable to develop solutions in the native language in question. There is consequently a strong trend towards building native language models even for low-resource languages. This paper questions this development, and explores the idea of simply translating the data into English, thereby enabling the use of pretrained, and large-scale, English language models. We demonstrate empirically that a large English language model coupled with modern machine translation outperforms native language models in most Scandinavian languages. The exception to this is Finnish, which we assume is due to inferior translation quality. Our results suggest that machine translation is a mature technology, which raises a serious counter-argument for training native language models for low-resource languages. This paper therefore strives to make a provocative but important point. As English language models are improving at an unprecedented pace, which in turn improves machine translation, it is from an empirical and environmental stand-point more effective to translate data from low-resource languages into English, than to build language models for such languages.

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GANDALF: a General Character Name Description Dataset for Long Fiction
Fredrik Carlsson | Magnus Sahlgren | Fredrik Olsson | Amaru Cuba Gyllensten
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

This paper introduces a long-range multiple-choice Question Answering (QA) dataset, based on full-length fiction book texts. The questions are formulated as 10-way multiple-choice questions, where the task is to select the correct character name given a character description, or vice-versa. Each character description is formulated in natural text and often contains information from several sections throughout the book. We provide 20,000 questions created from 10,000 manually annotated descriptions of characters from 177 books containing 152,917 words on average. We address the current discourse regarding dataset bias and leakage by a simple anonymization procedure, which in turn enables interesting probing possibilities. Finally, we show that suitable baseline algorithms perform very poorly on this task, with the book size itself making it non-trivial to attempt a Transformer-based QA solution. This leaves ample room for future improvement, and hints at the need for a completely different type of solution.