Zaid Alyafeai


2023

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Investigating Zero-shot Cross-lingual Language Understanding for Arabic
Zaid Alyafeai | Moataz Ahmed
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023

Numerous languages exhibit shared characteristics, especially in morphological features. For instance, Arabic and Russian both belong to the fusional language category. The question arises: Do such common traits influence language comprehension across diverse linguistic backgrounds? This study explores the possibility of transferring comprehension skills across languages to Arabic in a zero-shot scenario. Specifically, we demonstrate that training language models on other languages can enhance comprehension of Arabic, as evidenced by our evaluations in three key tasks: natural language inference, question answering, and named entity recognition. Our experiments reveal that certain morphologically rich languages (MRLs), such as Russian, display similarities to Arabic when assessed in a zero-shot context, particularly in tasks like question answering and natural language inference. However, this similarity is less pronounced in tasks like named entity recognition.

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Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning
Niklas Muennighoff | Thomas Wang | Lintang Sutawika | Adam Roberts | Stella Biderman | Teven Le Scao | M Saiful Bari | Sheng Shen | Zheng Xin Yong | Hailey Schoelkopf | Xiangru Tang | Dragomir Radev | Alham Fikri Aji | Khalid Almubarak | Samuel Albanie | Zaid Alyafeai | Albert Webson | Edward Raff | Colin Raffel
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained multilingual BLOOM and mT5 model families to produce finetuned variants called BLOOMZ and mT0. We find finetuning large multilingual language models on English tasks with English prompts allows for task genrealization to non-English languages that appear only in the pretraining corpus. Finetuning on multilingual tasks with English prompts further improves performance on English and non-English tasks leading to various state-of-the-art zero-shot results. We also investigate finetuning on multilingual tasks with prompts that have been machine-translated from English to match the language of each dataset. We find training on these machine-translated prompts leads to better performance on human-written prompts in the respective languages. Surprisingly, we find models are capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks in languages they have never intentionally seen. We conjecture that the models are learning higher-level capabilities that are both task- and language-agnostic. In addition, we introduce xP3, a composite of supervised datasets in 46 languages with English and machine-translated prompts. Our code, datasets and models are freely available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/xmtf.

2022

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Masader: Metadata Sourcing for Arabic Text and Speech Data Resources
Zaid Alyafeai | Maraim Masoud | Mustafa Ghaleb | Maged S. Al-shaibani
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The NLP pipeline has evolved dramatically in the last few years. The first step in the pipeline is to find suitable annotated datasets to evaluate the tasks we are trying to solve. Unfortunately, most of the published datasets lack metadata annotations that describe their attributes. Not to mention, the absence of a public catalogue that indexes all the publicly available datasets related to specific regions or languages. When we consider low-resource dialectical languages, for example, this issue becomes more prominent. In this paper, we create Masader, the largest public catalogue for Arabic NLP datasets, which consists of 200 datasets annotated with 25 attributes. Furthermore, we develop a metadata annotation strategy that could be extended to other languages. We also make remarks and highlight some issues about the current status of Arabic NLP datasets and suggest recommendations to address them.

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PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts
Stephen Bach | Victor Sanh | Zheng Xin Yong | Albert Webson | Colin Raffel | Nihal V. Nayak | Abheesht Sharma | Taewoon Kim | M Saiful Bari | Thibault Fevry | Zaid Alyafeai | Manan Dey | Andrea Santilli | Zhiqing Sun | Srulik Ben-david | Canwen Xu | Gunjan Chhablani | Han Wang | Jason Fries | Maged Al-shaibani | Shanya Sharma | Urmish Thakker | Khalid Almubarak | Xiangru Tang | Dragomir Radev | Mike Tian-jian Jiang | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts. Prompts are functions that map an example from a dataset to a natural language input and target output. Using prompts to train and query language models is an emerging area in NLP that requires new tools that let users develop and refine these prompts collaboratively. PromptSource addresses the emergent challenges in this new setting with (1) a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, (2) an interface that lets users quickly iterate on prompt development by observing outputs of their prompts on many examples, and (3) a community-driven set of guidelines for contributing new prompts to a common pool. Over 2,000 prompts for roughly 170 datasets are already available in PromptSource. PromptSource is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.

2021

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Arabic Compact Language Modelling for Resource Limited Devices
Zaid Alyafeai | Irfan Ahmad
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Natural language modelling has gained a lot of interest recently. The current state-of-the-art results are achieved by first training a very large language model and then fine-tuning it on multiple tasks. However, there is little work on smaller more compact language models for resource-limited devices or applications. Not to mention, how to efficiently train such models for a low-resource language like Arabic. In this paper, we investigate how such models can be trained in a compact way for Arabic. We also show how distillation and quantization can be applied to create even smaller models. Our experiments show that our largest model which is 2x smaller than the baseline can achieve better results on multiple tasks with 2x less data for pretraining.

2020

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ARBML: Democritizing Arabic Natural Language Processing Tools
Zaid Alyafeai | Maged Al-Shaibani
Proceedings of Second Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)

Automating natural language understanding is a lifelong quest addressed for decades. With the help of advances in machine learning and particularly, deep learning, we are able to produce state of the art models that can imitate human interactions with languages. Unfortunately, these advances are controlled by the availability of language resources. Arabic advances in this field , although it has a great potential, are still limited. This is apparent in both research and development. In this paper, we showcase some NLP models we trained for Arabic. We also present our methodology and pipeline to build such models from data collection, data preprocessing, tokenization and model deployment. These tools help in the advancement of the field and provide a systematic approach for extending NLP tools to many languages.