Bolshev's method of confidence limit construction

Confidence intervals and regions for the parameters of a distribution are constructed, following the method due to L. N. Bolshev. This construction method is illustrated with Poisson, exponential, Bernouilli, geometric, normal and other distributions depending on parameters

BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting

The BLOOM model is a large publicly available multilingual language model, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To extend the benefits of BLOOM to other languages without incurring prohibitively large costs, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM to new languages not seen during pretraining. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages in a resource-constrained setting. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, we find that adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling

Bolshev's method of confidence limit construction

Confidence intervals and regions for the parameters of a distribution are constructed, following the method due to L. N. Bolshev. This construction method is illustrated with Poisson, exponential, Bernouilli, geometric, normal and other distributions depending on parameters

Adaptation of Statistical Machine Translation Model for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval in a Service Context

This work proposes to adapt an existing general SMT model for the task of translating queries that are subsequently going to be used to retrieve information from a target language collection. In the scenario that we focus on access to the document collection itself is not available and changes to the IR model are not possible. We propose two ways to achieve the adaptation effect and both of them are aimed at tuning parameter weights on a set of parallel queries. The first approach is via a standard tuning procedure optimizing for BLEU score and the second one is via a reranking approach optimizing for MAP score. We also extend the second approach by using syntax-based features. Our experiments show improvements of 1-2.5 in terms of MAP score over the retrieval with the non-adapted translation. We show that these improvements are due both to the integration of the adaptation and syntax-features for the query translation task.