Harshita Diddee

5509 Gates Hillman Center, Carnegie Mellon University

LTI PhD @ Carnegie Mellon University

Hello!

I am a 2nd Year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University (LTI, School of Computer Science) where I am advised by Daphne Ippolito. I am interested in designing optimal composition for training datasets (Q-How do we select useful subsets of data from existing datasets when a NLP practioner defines “useful”), data quality estimation metrics (Q-How do we quantify the utility of a subset of data, Q-How do we select datapoints to evaluate Language Models on subjective problems like General Purpose Instruction Following).

I am on the lookout for internships for Summer 2025 so if any of these questions seem relevant, please reach out for a chat!

Prior to this, I spent 2 incredible years at Microsoft Research, India as a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow where I was advised by Kalika Bali. While at MSR, I studied the compression of Large Language Models (text and speech) operating under extreme data sparsity. I also led the development of INMT-Lite, an interactive neural machine translation service aimed at improving the yield of data collection pipelines for extremely low-resource languages.I have contributed to AI4Bharat’s Samanantar (Guided by Dr. Mitesh M. Khapra, IIT Madras) and VisionAir (Guided by Dr. Aakanksha Chowdhery, Google Brain, Work featured by TensorFlow). I graduated as the Best Outgoing Student for the Class of 2021, from Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering (B.Tech, Computer Science) as well the Best Outgoing Student of the Department of Computer Science.

My earliest formal education started about 20 years ago when I began learning Odissi, an Indian Classical Dance originating in Odisha. Dashavatar or The Ten Primary Avatars of Vishnu and Battu are some recitals in this diversely rich art form ( I am the dancer in the pink-purple costume :)). Consequently, I am also deeply invested in music (any and every form or language - Here is me singing a Hindi Bhajan).

News

Feb 2024	INMT-Lite accepted to LREC 2024! Code and Paper out!
Oct 2023	2 Papers Accepted to EMNLP 2023! MEGA and Fifty Shades of Bias: Normative Ratings of Gender Bias in GPT Generated English Text accepted to EMNLP 2023.
Apr 2023	Accepted an offer to join LTI @ Carnegie Mellon University for my PhD!
Nov 2022	I’ll be attending ALPS Winter School this January! Let’s chat if you are interested in referenceless NLG evaluations and Quality Estimation. You can check out my poster on our preliminary constraint review of QE here!
Nov 2022	CodeFed: Federated Speech Recognition for Low-Resource Code-Switching Detection has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP)!
Oct 2022	Too Brittle To Touch: Comparing the Stability of Quantization and Distillation towards developing Low-Resource MT Models was accepted to WMT (Research Track): Check out the Preprint and Code! Headed to EMNLP to present it! Let’s chat if you’re interested in Data Quality Estimation, contrainsted generation or anything Low-Resource :)
Aug 2022	Joining the organizing committee for The 2022 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, SLT 2022 Hackathon!
Jul 2022	Visiting Johns Hopkins University for the month as a part of JSALT’22: Contributing to the Speech Translation for Under-Resourced Languages Track
May 2022	Presenting our work A Collaborative Approach to Developing Language Technology Interventions for Endangered Languages and leading the panel (Panel A) at the ComputEL-5, ACL’22

Selected Papers

INMT-Lite: Accelerating Low-Resource Language Data Collection via Offline Interactive Neural Machine Translation

Harshita Diddee, Anurag Shukla, Tanuja Ganu, and 4 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) May 2024

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A steady increase in the performance of Massively Multilingual Models (MMLMs) has contributed to their rapidly increasing use in data collection pipelines. Interactive Neural Machine Translation (INMT) systems are one class of tools that can utilize MMLMs to promote such data collection in several under-resourced languages. However, these tools are often not adapted to the deployment constraints that native language speakers operate in, as bloated, online inference-oriented MMLMs trained for data-rich languages, drive them. INMT-Lite addresses these challenges through its support of (1) three different modes of Internet-independent deployment and (2) a suite of four assistive interfaces suitable for (3) data-sparse languages. We perform an extensive user study for INMT-Lite with an under-resourced language community, Gondi, to find that INMT-Lite improves the data generation experience of community members along multiple axes, such as cognitive load, task productivity, and interface interaction time and effort, without compromising on the quality of the generated translations.INMT-Lite’s code is open-sourced to further research in this domain.
MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI

Kabir Ahuja, Harshita Diddee, Rishav Hada, and 9 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Dec 2023

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Generative AI models have shown impressive performance on many Natural Language Processing tasks such as language understanding, reasoning, and language generation. An important question being asked by the AI community today is about the capabilities and limits of these models, and it is clear that evaluating generative AI is very challenging. Most studies on generative LLMs have been restricted to English and it is unclear how capable these models are at understanding and generating text in other languages. We present the first comprehensive benchmarking of generative LLMs - MEGA, which evaluates models on standard NLP benchmarks, covering 16 NLP datasets across 70 typologically diverse languages. We compare the performance of generative LLMs including Chat-GPT and GPT-4 to State of the Art (SOTA) non-autoregressive models on these tasks to determine how well generative models perform compared to the previous generation of LLMs. We present a thorough analysis of the performance of models across languages and tasks and discuss challenges in improving the performance of generative LLMs on low-resource languages. We create a framework for evaluating generative LLMs in the multilingual setting and provide directions for future progress in the field.
Too Brittle To Touch: Comparing the Stability of Quantization and Distillation Towards Developing Lightweight Low-Resource MT Models

Harshita Diddee, Sandipan Dandapat, Monojit Choudhury, and 2 more authors

Conference On Machine Translation 2022 Oct 2022

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Leveraging shared learning through Massively Multilingual Models, state-of-the-art machine translation models are often able to adapt to the paucity of data for low-resource languages. However, this performance comes at the cost of significantly bloated models which are not practically deployable. Knowledge Distillation is one popular technique to develop competitive, lightweight models: In this work, we first evaluate its use to compress MT models focusing on languages with extremely limited training data. Through our analysis across 8 languages, we find that the variance in the performance of the distilled models due to their dependence on priors including the amount of synthetic data used for distillation, the student architecture, training hyperparameters and confidence of the teacher models, makes distillation a brittle compression mechanism. To mitigate this, we explore the use of post-training quantization for the compression of these models. Here, we find that while distillation provides gains across some low-resource languages, quantization provides more consistent performance trends for the entire range of languages, especially the lowest-resource languages in our target set.