Can Machine Translation Bridge Multilingual Pretraining and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ji, Shaoxiong, Mickus, Timothee, Segonne, Vincent, Tiedemann, Jörg
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ji, Shaoxiong
Mickus, Timothee
Segonne, Vincent
Tiedemann, Jörg
author_facet Ji, Shaoxiong
Mickus, Timothee
Segonne, Vincent
Tiedemann, Jörg
contents Multilingual pretraining and fine-tuning have remarkably succeeded in various natural language processing tasks. Transferring representations from one language to another is especially crucial for cross-lingual learning. One can expect machine translation objectives to be well suited to fostering such capabilities, as they involve the explicit alignment of semantically equivalent sentences from different languages. This paper investigates the potential benefits of employing machine translation as a continued training objective to enhance language representation learning, bridging multilingual pretraining and cross-lingual applications. We study this question through two lenses: a quantitative evaluation of the performance of existing models and an analysis of their latent representations. Our results show that, contrary to expectations, machine translation as the continued training fails to enhance cross-lingual representation learning in multiple cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. We conclude that explicit sentence-level alignment in the cross-lingual scenario is detrimental to cross-lingual transfer pretraining, which has important implications for future cross-lingual transfer studies. We furthermore provide evidence through similarity measures and investigation of parameters that this lack of positive influence is due to output separability -- which we argue is of use for machine translation but detrimental elsewhere.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_16777
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Machine Translation Bridge Multilingual Pretraining and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning?
Ji, Shaoxiong
Mickus, Timothee
Segonne, Vincent
Tiedemann, Jörg
Computation and Language
Multilingual pretraining and fine-tuning have remarkably succeeded in various natural language processing tasks. Transferring representations from one language to another is especially crucial for cross-lingual learning. One can expect machine translation objectives to be well suited to fostering such capabilities, as they involve the explicit alignment of semantically equivalent sentences from different languages. This paper investigates the potential benefits of employing machine translation as a continued training objective to enhance language representation learning, bridging multilingual pretraining and cross-lingual applications. We study this question through two lenses: a quantitative evaluation of the performance of existing models and an analysis of their latent representations. Our results show that, contrary to expectations, machine translation as the continued training fails to enhance cross-lingual representation learning in multiple cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. We conclude that explicit sentence-level alignment in the cross-lingual scenario is detrimental to cross-lingual transfer pretraining, which has important implications for future cross-lingual transfer studies. We furthermore provide evidence through similarity measures and investigation of parameters that this lack of positive influence is due to output separability -- which we argue is of use for machine translation but detrimental elsewhere.
title Can Machine Translation Bridge Multilingual Pretraining and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16777