LangSAMP: Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining

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Main Authors: Liu, Yihong, Ye, Haotian, Ma, Chunlan, Wang, Mingyang, Schütze, Hinrich
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Liu, Yihong
Ye, Haotian
Ma, Chunlan
Wang, Mingyang
Schütze, Hinrich
author_facet Liu, Yihong
Ye, Haotian
Ma, Chunlan
Wang, Mingyang
Schütze, Hinrich
contents Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to individual languages. However, this places a significant burden on token representations to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder language neutrality. To address this limitation, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the Transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline in zero-shot crosslingual transfer across diverse downstream tasks. Extensive analysis reveals that language and script embeddings capture language- and script-specific nuances, which benefits more language-neutral representations, proven by improved pairwise cosine similarity. In our case study, we also show that language and script embeddings can be used to select better source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_18199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LangSAMP: Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining
Liu, Yihong
Ye, Haotian
Ma, Chunlan
Wang, Mingyang
Schütze, Hinrich
Computation and Language
Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to individual languages. However, this places a significant burden on token representations to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder language neutrality. To address this limitation, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the Transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline in zero-shot crosslingual transfer across diverse downstream tasks. Extensive analysis reveals that language and script embeddings capture language- and script-specific nuances, which benefits more language-neutral representations, proven by improved pairwise cosine similarity. In our case study, we also show that language and script embeddings can be used to select better source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP.
title LangSAMP: Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18199