Papers by Mahani Aljunied
Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are known to perform tasks by simply observing few exemplars, but performance among under-represented languages falls behind due to pre-training data imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose to assemble synthetic exemplars from high-resource languages to prompt LLMs to translate from any language into English and use them to create intra-lingual exemplar models to perform tasks in target languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms supervised few-shot learning in LLMs of different sizes for translations between English and 13 Indic and 21 African low-resource languages. |
Analyzing LLMs’ Knowledge Boundary Cognition Across Languages Through the Lens of Internal Representations (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Understanding the knowledge boundaries of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial to prevent hallucination, but research on the knowledge boundary perceptions of LLMs has predominantly focused on English. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free alignment method that effectively transfers knowledge boundary perception ability across languages, thereby helping reduce hallucination risk in low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination risk in low-resource languages by fine-tuning on bilingual question pair translation. |
M-LongDoc: A Benchmark For Multimodal Super-Long Document Understanding And A Retrieval-Aware Tuning Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yew Ken Chia, Liying Cheng, Hou Pong Chan, Maojia Song, Chaoqun Liu, Mahani Aljunied, Soujanya Poria, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large multimodal models focus on short documents with less than 50 pages and are limited to extraction-based questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-aware tuning approach to improve the accuracy of multimodal document reading by 4.6%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of model responses by 4.6% compared to existing benchmarks on documents with hundreds of pages and longer documents with more complex content. |
SeaExam and SeaBench: Benchmarking LLMs with Local Multilingual Questions in Southeast Asia (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various English benchmarks, including both human exam datasets such as MMLU and instruction-following datasets. |
| Approach: | They introduce two new benchmarks to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models in Southeast Asian (SEA) application scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they can discern LLM performance on SEA language tasks compared to their translated benchmarks. |
SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages. |
| Outcome: | SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations . |
GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual task-oriented dialogue datasets lack high-quality data curation due to the high expense and challenges of human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates a multilingual ToD dataset globalized from an English ToD data set for three unexplored use cases of multilingual toD systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates a large-scale multilingual ToD dataset globalized from an English ToD data set for three unexplored use cases of multilingual toD systems. |