Cross-lingual transfer of multilingual models on low resource African Languages

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Thangaraj, Harish, Chenat, Ananya, Walia, Jaskaran Singh, Marivate, Vukosi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Thangaraj, Harish
Chenat, Ananya
Walia, Jaskaran Singh
Marivate, Vukosi
author_facet Thangaraj, Harish
Chenat, Ananya
Walia, Jaskaran Singh
Marivate, Vukosi
contents Large multilingual models have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) research. However, their high resource demands and potential biases from diverse data sources have raised concerns about their effectiveness across low-resource languages. In contrast, monolingual models, trained on a single language, may better capture the nuances of the target language, potentially providing more accurate results. This study benchmarks the cross-lingual transfer capabilities from a high-resource language to a low-resource language for both, monolingual and multilingual models, focusing on Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two Bantu languages. We evaluate the performance of transformer based architectures like Multilingual BERT (mBERT), AfriBERT, and BantuBERTa against neural-based architectures such as BiGRU, CNN, and char-CNN. The models were trained on Kinyarwanda and tested on Kirundi, with fine-tuning applied to assess the extent of performance improvement and catastrophic forgetting. AfriBERT achieved the highest cross-lingual accuracy of 88.3% after fine-tuning, while BiGRU emerged as the best-performing neural model with 83.3% accuracy. We also analyze the degree of forgetting in the original language post-fine-tuning. While monolingual models remain competitive, this study highlights that multilingual models offer strong cross-lingual transfer capabilities in resource limited settings.
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-lingual transfer of multilingual models on low resource African Languages
Thangaraj, Harish
Chenat, Ananya
Walia, Jaskaran Singh
Marivate, Vukosi
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large multilingual models have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) research. However, their high resource demands and potential biases from diverse data sources have raised concerns about their effectiveness across low-resource languages. In contrast, monolingual models, trained on a single language, may better capture the nuances of the target language, potentially providing more accurate results. This study benchmarks the cross-lingual transfer capabilities from a high-resource language to a low-resource language for both, monolingual and multilingual models, focusing on Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two Bantu languages. We evaluate the performance of transformer based architectures like Multilingual BERT (mBERT), AfriBERT, and BantuBERTa against neural-based architectures such as BiGRU, CNN, and char-CNN. The models were trained on Kinyarwanda and tested on Kirundi, with fine-tuning applied to assess the extent of performance improvement and catastrophic forgetting. AfriBERT achieved the highest cross-lingual accuracy of 88.3% after fine-tuning, while BiGRU emerged as the best-performing neural model with 83.3% accuracy. We also analyze the degree of forgetting in the original language post-fine-tuning. While monolingual models remain competitive, this study highlights that multilingual models offer strong cross-lingual transfer capabilities in resource limited settings.
title Cross-lingual transfer of multilingual models on low resource African Languages
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10965