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Vitaly Nikolaev

Bio: Vitaly Nikolaev is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer science & Question answering. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 11 publications receiving 242 citations.

Papers
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TL;DR: A quantitative analysis of the data quality and example-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora are presented.
Abstract: Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA---a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs. The languages of TyDi QA are diverse with regard to their typology---the set of linguistic features each language expresses---such that we expect models performing well on this set to generalize across a large number of the world's languages. We present a quantitative analysis of the data quality and example-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora. To provide a realistic information-seeking task and avoid priming effects, questions are written by people who want to know the answer, but don't know the answer yet, and the data is collected directly in each language without the use of translation.

200 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: TyDi QA as mentioned in this paper ) is a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with question answering in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.
Abstract: Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA—a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with ...

189 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: GEM as discussed by the authors is a living benchmark for natural language generation (NLG), its Evaluation and Metrics, which provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested.
Abstract: We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for which we are organizing a shared task at our ACL 2021 Workshop and to which we invite the entire NLG community to participate.

44 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
02 Feb 2021
TL;DR: GEM as discussed by the authors is a living benchmark for natural language generation (NLG), its Evaluation and Metrics, which provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested.
Abstract: We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for the 2021 shared task at the associated GEM Workshop.

26 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
22 Jun 2022
TL;DR: The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces GEMv2, which introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work.
Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

16 citations


Cited by
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Journal Article
TL;DR: A 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which is called PaLM achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark.
Abstract: Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning , which drastically reduces the number of task-specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model (PaLM). We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly efficient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued benefits of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the finetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A significant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.

1,429 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jun 2021
TL;DR: This paper proposed a multilingual variant of T5, mT5, which was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages and achieved state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks.
Abstract: The recent “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5) leveraged a unified text-to-text format and scale to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of English-language NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce mT5, a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. We detail the design and modified training of mT5 and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks. We also describe a simple technique to prevent “accidental translation” in the zero-shot setting, where a generative model chooses to (partially) translate its prediction into the wrong language. All of the code and model checkpoints used in this work are publicly available.

1,016 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: WILDS is presented, a benchmark of in-the-wild distribution shifts spanning diverse data modalities and applications, and is hoped to encourage the development of general-purpose methods that are anchored to real-world distribution shifts and that work well across different applications and problem settings.
Abstract: Distribution shifts -- where the training distribution differs from the test distribution -- can substantially degrade the accuracy of machine learning (ML) systems deployed in the wild. Despite their ubiquity, these real-world distribution shifts are under-represented in the datasets widely used in the ML community today. To address this gap, we present WILDS, a curated collection of 8 benchmark datasets that reflect a diverse range of distribution shifts which naturally arise in real-world applications, such as shifts across hospitals for tumor identification; across camera traps for wildlife monitoring; and across time and location in satellite imaging and poverty mapping. On each dataset, we show that standard training results in substantially lower out-of-distribution than in-distribution performance, and that this gap remains even with models trained by existing methods for handling distribution shifts. This underscores the need for new training methods that produce models which are more robust to the types of distribution shifts that arise in practice. To facilitate method development, we provide an open-source package that automates dataset loading, contains default model architectures and hyperparameters, and standardizes evaluations. Code and leaderboards are available at this https URL.

579 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: The Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders XTREME benchmark is introduced, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingually generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks.
Abstract: Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders XTREME benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks. We demonstrate that while models tested on English reach human performance on many tasks, there is still a sizable gap in the performance of cross-lingually transferred models, particularly on syntactic and sentence retrieval tasks. There is also a wide spread of results across languages. We release the benchmark to encourage research on cross-lingual learning methods that transfer linguistic knowledge across a diverse and representative set of languages and tasks.

538 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: BLOOM as discussed by the authors is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total).
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

407 citations