Paper ID: 2311.00587

Crosslingual Retrieval Augmented In-context Learning for Bangla

Xiaoqian Li, Ercong Nie, Sheng Liang

The promise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Processing has often been overshadowed by their limited performance in low-resource languages such as Bangla. To address this, our paper presents a pioneering approach that utilizes cross-lingual retrieval augmented in-context learning. By strategically sourcing semantically similar prompts from high-resource language, we enable multilingual pretrained language models (MPLMs), especially the generative model BLOOMZ, to successfully boost performance on Bangla tasks. Our extensive evaluation highlights that the cross-lingual retrieval augmented prompts bring steady improvements to MPLMs over the zero-shot performance.

Submitted: Nov 1, 2023