Zelin Zhou


2025

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Do Large Language Models have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs
Yanzhu Guo | Simone Conia | Zelin Zhou | Min Li | Saloni Potdar | Henry Xiao
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases. Much like speakers who might produce awkward expressions when learning a second language, LLMs often generate unnatural outputs in non-English languages, reflecting English-centric patterns in both vocabulary and grammar. Despite the importance of this issue, the naturalness of multilingual LLM outputs has received limited attention. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing novel automatic corpus-level metrics to assess the lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLM outputs in a multilingual context. Using our new metrics, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on a curated benchmark in French and Chinese, revealing a tendency towards English-influenced patterns. To mitigate this issue, we also propose a simple and effective alignment method to improve the naturalness of an LLM in a target language and domain, achieving consistent improvements in naturalness without compromising the performance on general-purpose benchmarks. Our work highlights the importance of developing multilingual metrics, resources and methods for the new wave of multilingual LLMs.

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KG-TRICK: Unifying Textual and Relational Information Completion of Knowledge for Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
Zelin Zhou | Simone Conia | Daniel Lee | Min Li | Shenglei Huang | Umar Farooq Minhas | Saloni Potdar | Henry Xiao | Yunyao Li
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Multilingual knowledge graphs (KGs) provide high-quality relational and textual information for various NLP applications, but they are often incomplete, especially in non-English languages. Previous research has shown that combining information from KGs in different languages aids either Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), the task of predicting missing relations between entities, or Knowledge Graph Enhancement (KGE), the task of predicting missing textual information for entities. Although previous efforts have considered KGC and KGE as independent tasks, we hypothesize that they are interdependent and mutually beneficial. To this end, we introduce KG-TRICK, a novel sequence-to-sequence framework that unifies the tasks of textual and relational information completion for multilingual KGs. KG-TRICK demonstrates that: i) it is possible to unify the tasks of KGC and KGE into a single framework, and ii) combining textual information from multiple languages is beneficial to improve the completeness of a KG. As part of our contributions, we also introduce WikiKGE10++, the largest manually-curated benchmark for textual information completion of KGs, which features over 25,000 entities across 10 diverse languages.

2023

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Transferable and Efficient: Unifying Dynamic Multi-Domain Product Categorization
Shansan Gong | Zelin Zhou | Shuo Wang | Fengjiao Chen | Xiujie Song | Xuezhi Cao | Yunsen Xian | Kenny Zhu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

As e-commerce platforms develop different business lines, a special but challenging product categorization scenario emerges, where there are multiple domain-specific category taxonomies and each of them evolves dynamically over time. In order to unify the categorization process and ensure efficiency, we propose a two-stage taxonomy-agnostic framework that relies solely on calculating the semantic relatedness between product titles and category names in the vector space. To further enhance domain transferability and better exploit cross-domain data, we design two plug-in modules: a heuristic mapping scorer and a pretrained contrastive ranking module with the help of meta concepts, which represent keyword knowledge shared across domains. Comprehensive offline experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselineson three dynamic multi-domain product categorization (DMPC) tasks,and online experiments reconfirm its efficacy with a5% increase on seasonal purchase revenue. Related datasets will be released.