Assessing the Role of Lexical Semantics in Cross-lingual Transfer through Controlled Manipulations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ilani, Roy, Karidi, Taelin, Abend, Omri
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ilani, Roy
Karidi, Taelin
Abend, Omri
author_facet Ilani, Roy
Karidi, Taelin
Abend, Omri
contents While cross-linguistic model transfer is effective in many settings, there is still limited understanding of the conditions under which it works. In this paper, we focus on assessing the role of lexical semantics in cross-lingual transfer, as we compare its impact to that of other language properties. Examining each language property individually, we systematically analyze how differences between English and a target language influence the capacity to align the language with an English pretrained representation space. We do so by artificially manipulating the English sentences in ways that mimic specific characteristics of the target language, and reporting the effect of each manipulation on the quality of alignment with the representation space. We show that while properties such as the script or word order only have a limited impact on alignment quality, the degree of lexical matching between the two languages, which we define using a measure of translation entropy, greatly affects it.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_07599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assessing the Role of Lexical Semantics in Cross-lingual Transfer through Controlled Manipulations
Ilani, Roy
Karidi, Taelin
Abend, Omri
Computation and Language
While cross-linguistic model transfer is effective in many settings, there is still limited understanding of the conditions under which it works. In this paper, we focus on assessing the role of lexical semantics in cross-lingual transfer, as we compare its impact to that of other language properties. Examining each language property individually, we systematically analyze how differences between English and a target language influence the capacity to align the language with an English pretrained representation space. We do so by artificially manipulating the English sentences in ways that mimic specific characteristics of the target language, and reporting the effect of each manipulation on the quality of alignment with the representation space. We show that while properties such as the script or word order only have a limited impact on alignment quality, the degree of lexical matching between the two languages, which we define using a measure of translation entropy, greatly affects it.
title Assessing the Role of Lexical Semantics in Cross-lingual Transfer through Controlled Manipulations
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07599