mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lin, Peiqin, Hu, Chengzhi, Zhang, Zheyu, Martins, André F. T., Schütze, Hinrich
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Lin, Peiqin
Hu, Chengzhi
Zhang, Zheyu
Martins, André F. T.
Schütze, Hinrich
author_facet Lin, Peiqin
Hu, Chengzhi
Zhang, Zheyu
Martins, André F. T.
Schütze, Hinrich
contents Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLMSim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLMSim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_13684
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models
Lin, Peiqin
Hu, Chengzhi
Zhang, Zheyu
Martins, André F. T.
Schütze, Hinrich
Computation and Language
Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLMSim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLMSim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.
title mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13684