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Massively multilingual language models such as multilingual BERT offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks. However, due to limited capacity and large differences in pretraining data sizes, there is a…

This paper investigates the transferability of debiasing techniques across different languages within multilingual models. We examine the applicability of these techniques in English, French, German, and Dutch. Using multilingual BERT…

Recent work in cross-lingual semantic parsing has successfully applied machine translation to localize parsers to new languages. However, these advances assume access to high-quality machine translation systems and word alignment tools. We…

Few-shot crosslingual transfer has been shown to outperform its zero-shot counterpart with pretrained encoders like multilingual BERT. Despite its growing popularity, little to no attention has been paid to standardizing and analyzing the…

In this paper, we study the problem of employing pre-trained language models for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based chatbots. A new model, named Speaker-Aware BERT (SA-BERT), is proposed in order to make the model aware of the…

For many (minority) languages, the resources needed to train large models are not available. We investigate the performance of zero-shot transfer learning with as little data as possible, and the influence of language similarity in this…

The capacity and effectiveness of pre-trained multilingual models (MLMs) for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is well established. However, phenomena of positive or negative transfer, and the effect of language choice still need to be fully…

Large multilingual pretrained language models such as mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have been found to be surprisingly effective for cross-lingual transfer of syntactic parsing models (Wu and Dredze 2019), but only between related languages.…

Deep learning-based language models pretrained on large unannotated text corpora have been demonstrated to allow efficient transfer learning for natural language processing, with recent approaches such as the transformer-based BERT model…

Cross-lingual transfer is central to modern NLP, enabling models to perform tasks in languages different from those they were trained on. A common assumption is that training on more languages improves zero-shot transfer. We test this on…

Task-oriented personal assistants enable people to interact with a host of devices and services using natural language. One of the challenges of making neural dialogue systems available to more users is the lack of training data for all but…

Unsupervised cross-lingual transfer involves transferring knowledge between languages without explicit supervision. Although numerous studies have been conducted to improve performance in such tasks by focusing on cross-lingual knowledge,…

Massively multilingual transformers pretrained with language modeling objectives (e.g., mBERT, XLM-R) have become a de facto default transfer paradigm for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in NLP, offering unmatched transfer performance.…

Multilingual Language Models (\MLLMs) such as mBERT, XLM, XLM-R, \textit{etc.} have emerged as a viable option for bringing the power of pretraining to a large number of languages. Given their success in zero-shot transfer learning, there…

Zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer enables the multilingual pretrained language model (mPLM), finetuned on a task in one language, make predictions for this task in other languages. While being broadly studied for natural language…

Contextual word embeddings (e.g. GPT, BERT, ELMo, etc.) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. Recent work with the multilingual version of BERT has shown that the model performs very well in zero-shot and…

We propose a simple method to align multilingual contextual embeddings as a post-pretraining step for improved zero-shot cross-lingual transferability of the pretrained models. Using parallel data, our method aligns embeddings on the word…

Pre-training a transformer-based model for the language modeling task in a large dataset and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has been found very useful in recent years. One major advantage of such pre-trained language models is…

Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented…

We propose procedures for evaluating and strengthening contextual embedding alignment and show that they are useful in analyzing and improving multilingual BERT. In particular, after our proposed alignment procedure, BERT exhibits…