Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Cross-lingual Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jung, Haeji, Oh, Changdae, Kang, Jooeon, Sohn, Jimin, Song, Kyungwoo, Kim, Jinkyu, Mortensen, David R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jung, Haeji
Oh, Changdae
Kang, Jooeon
Sohn, Jimin
Song, Kyungwoo
Kim, Jinkyu
Mortensen, David R.
author_facet Jung, Haeji
Oh, Changdae
Kang, Jooeon
Sohn, Jimin
Song, Kyungwoo
Kim, Jinkyu
Mortensen, David R.
contents Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. While there are efforts to align the languages in a single latent space to mitigate such gaps, how different input-level representations influence such gaps has not been investigated, particularly with phonemic inputs. We hypothesize that the performance gaps are affected by representation discrepancies between these languages, and revisit the use of phonemic representations as a means to mitigate these discrepancies. To demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representations, we present experiments on three representative cross-lingual tasks on 12 languages in total. The results show that phonemic representations exhibit higher similarities between languages compared to orthographic representations, and it consistently outperforms grapheme-based baseline model on languages that are relatively low-resourced. We present quantitative evidence from three cross-lingual tasks that demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representations, and it is further justified by a theoretical analysis of the cross-lingual performance gap.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14279
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Cross-lingual Transfer
Jung, Haeji
Oh, Changdae
Kang, Jooeon
Sohn, Jimin
Song, Kyungwoo
Kim, Jinkyu
Mortensen, David R.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. While there are efforts to align the languages in a single latent space to mitigate such gaps, how different input-level representations influence such gaps has not been investigated, particularly with phonemic inputs. We hypothesize that the performance gaps are affected by representation discrepancies between these languages, and revisit the use of phonemic representations as a means to mitigate these discrepancies. To demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representations, we present experiments on three representative cross-lingual tasks on 12 languages in total. The results show that phonemic representations exhibit higher similarities between languages compared to orthographic representations, and it consistently outperforms grapheme-based baseline model on languages that are relatively low-resourced. We present quantitative evidence from three cross-lingual tasks that demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representations, and it is further justified by a theoretical analysis of the cross-lingual performance gap.
title Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Cross-lingual Transfer
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14279