Key ingredients for effective zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer in generative tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chirkova, Nadezhda, Nikoulina, Vassilina
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Chirkova, Nadezhda
Nikoulina, Vassilina
author_facet Chirkova, Nadezhda
Nikoulina, Vassilina
contents Zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer enables a multilingual pretrained language model, finetuned on a task in one language, make predictions for this task in other languages. While being broadly studied for natural language understanding tasks, the described setting is understudied for generation. Previous works notice a frequent problem of generation in a wrong language and propose approaches to address it, usually using mT5 as a backbone model. In this work we compare various approaches proposed from the literature in unified settings, also including alternative backbone models, namely mBART and NLLB-200. We first underline the importance of tuning learning rate used for finetuning, which helps to substantially alleviate the problem of generation in the wrong language. Then, we show that with careful learning rate tuning, the simple full finetuning of the model acts as a very strong baseline and alternative approaches bring only marginal improvements. Finally, we find that mBART performs similarly to mT5 of the same size, and NLLB-200 can be competitive in some cases. Our final zero-shot models reach the performance of the approach based on data translation which is usually considered as an upper baseline for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12279
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Key ingredients for effective zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer in generative tasks
Chirkova, Nadezhda
Nikoulina, Vassilina
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer enables a multilingual pretrained language model, finetuned on a task in one language, make predictions for this task in other languages. While being broadly studied for natural language understanding tasks, the described setting is understudied for generation. Previous works notice a frequent problem of generation in a wrong language and propose approaches to address it, usually using mT5 as a backbone model. In this work we compare various approaches proposed from the literature in unified settings, also including alternative backbone models, namely mBART and NLLB-200. We first underline the importance of tuning learning rate used for finetuning, which helps to substantially alleviate the problem of generation in the wrong language. Then, we show that with careful learning rate tuning, the simple full finetuning of the model acts as a very strong baseline and alternative approaches bring only marginal improvements. Finally, we find that mBART performs similarly to mT5 of the same size, and NLLB-200 can be competitive in some cases. Our final zero-shot models reach the performance of the approach based on data translation which is usually considered as an upper baseline for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in generation.
title Key ingredients for effective zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer in generative tasks
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12279