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Sarmad Hussain

Publications and source records attributed to Sarmad Hussain.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Multi-Task Learning by using Contextualized Word Representations for Syntactic Parsing of a Morphologically Rich Language

We address the challenge of syntactic parsing for Urdu, a morphologically rich language, and present state-of-the-art results for both constituency and dependency parsing. This paper offers four major contributions: 1) the conversion of the CLE-UTB phrase structure treebank into a dependency treebank by developing language-specific head-word and phrase-to-dependency label mapping rules; 2) a novel sequence labeling scheme that transforms the parsing task into a unified representation; 3) the training of contextualized word representations on a large 220 million tokens Urdu corpus collected from the web; and 4) development of parsing framework using two learning paradigms, single-task and multi-task learning. Several post-processing rules are applied to improve the quality of the automatically converted dependency structure treebank. The proposed sequence labeling scheme enables the use of a shared architecture that learns the syntactic structures from both grammatical structures simultaneously and hence improves generalization. Experiments show that the multi-task learning setup significantly enhances parsing performance, achieving an F1 score of 91.39 for constituency parsing (an improvement of 3.29 points) and a labeled attachment score of 85.69 for dependency parsing (an improvement of 1.49 points). These results demonstrate that learning cross-task representations provides measurable benefits and advances the state of syntactic parsing for Urdu.

cs.CL↗

UrduLLaMA 1.0: Dataset Curation, Preprocessing, and Evaluation in Low-Resource Settings

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often provide suboptimal performance on low-resource languages like Urdu. This paper introduces UrduLLaMA 1.0, a model derived from the open-source Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct architecture and continually pre-trained on 128 million Urdu tokens, capturing the rich diversity of the language. To enhance instruction-following and translation capabilities, we leverage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine tune the model on 41,000 Urdu instructions and approximately 50,000 English-Urdu translation pairs. Evaluation across three machine translation datasets demonstrates significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, establishing a new benchmark for Urdu LLMs. These findings underscore the potential of targeted adaptation strategies with limited data and computational resources to address the unique challenges of low-resource languages.

cs.CL↗

Benchmarking the Performance of Pre-trained LLMs across Urdu NLP Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on multilingual data have revolutionized natural language processing research, by transitioning from languages and task specific model pipelines to a single model adapted on a variety of tasks. However majority of existing multilingual NLP benchmarks for LLMs provide evaluation data in only few languages with little linguistic diversity. In addition these benchmarks lack quality assessment against the respective state-of the art models. This study presents an in-depth examination of 7 prominent LLMs: GPT-3.5-turbo, Llama 2-7B-Chat, Llama 3.1-8B, Bloomz 3B, Bloomz 7B1, Ministral-8B and Whisper (Large, medium and small variant) across 17 tasks using 22 datasets, 13.8 hours of speech, in a zero-shot setting, and their performance against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, has been compared and analyzed. Our experiments show that SOTA models currently outperform encoder-decoder models in majority of Urdu NLP tasks under zero-shot settings. However, comparing Llama 3.1-8B over prior version Llama 2-7B-Chat, we can deduce that with improved language coverage, LLMs can surpass these SOTA models. Our results emphasize that models with fewer parameters but richer language-specific data, like Llama 3.1-8B, often outperform larger models with lower language diversity, such as GPT-3.5, in several tasks.

cs.CL↗

Multilingual phonological analysis and speech synthesis

We give an overview of multilingual speech synthesis using the IPOX system. The first part discusses work in progress for various languages: Tashlhit Berber, Urdu and Dutch. The second part discusses a multilingual phonological grammar, which can be adapted to a particular language by setting parameters and adding language-specific details.

cmp-lg↗