English

Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Multiple Source and Target Languages for Information Extraction: Language Selection and Adversarial Training

Computation and Language 2024-11-14 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The majority of previous researches addressing multi-lingual IE are limited to zero-shot cross-lingual single-transfer (one-to-one) setting, with high-resource languages predominantly as source training data. As a result, these works provide little understanding and benefit for the realistic goal of developing a multi-lingual IE system that can generalize to as many languages as possible. Our study aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed analysis on Cross-Lingual Multi-Transferability (many-to-many transfer learning), for the recent IE corpora that cover a diverse set of languages. Specifically, we first determine the correlation between single-transfer performance and a wide range of linguistic-based distances. From the obtained insights, a combined language distance metric can be developed that is not only highly correlated but also robust across different tasks and model scales. Next, we investigate the more general zero-shot multi-lingual transfer settings where multiple languages are involved in the training and evaluation processes. Language clustering based on the newly defined distance can provide directions for achieving the optimal cost-performance trade-off in data (languages) selection problem. Finally, a relational-transfer setting is proposed to further incorporate multi-lingual unlabeled data based on adversarial training using the relation induced from the above linguistic distance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.08785,
  title  = {Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Multiple Source and Target Languages for Information Extraction: Language Selection and Adversarial Training},
  author = {Nghia Trung Ngo and Thien Huu Nguyen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.08785},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:58:36.136Z