Related papers: When Being Unseen from mBERT is just the Beginning…

When learning a new skill, you take advantage of your preexisting skills and knowledge. For instance, if you are a skilled violinist, you will likely have an easier time learning to play cello. Similarly, when learning a new language you…

Recent models such as XLS-R and Whisper have made multilingual speech technologies more accessible by pre-training on audio from around 100 spoken languages each. However, there are thousands of spoken languages worldwide, and adapting to…

Multilingual language models have shown impressive cross-lingual transfer ability across a diverse set of languages and tasks. To improve the cross-lingual ability of these models, some strategies include transliteration and finer-grained…

In this work, we study whether multilingual language models (MultiLMs) can transfer logical reasoning abilities to other languages when they are fine-tuned for reasoning in a different language. We evaluate the cross-lingual reasoning…

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have become the central building block of many NLP applications. Training these models requires ever more computational resources and most of the existing models are trained on English text only. It is…

Recently, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed an impressive progress in many areas, due to the advent of novel, pretrained contextual representation models. In particular, Devlin et al. (2019) proposed a model, called BERT…

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle across tasks outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual transfer to lower-resource languages where task-specific post-training data is scarce. Building on prior…

In recent years, pre-trained Multilingual Language Models (MLLMs) have shown a strong ability to transfer knowledge across different languages. However, given that the aspiration for such an ability has not been explicitly incorporated in…

Multilingual sentence encoders are widely used to transfer NLP models across languages. The success of this transfer is, however, dependent on the model's ability to encode the patterns of cross-lingual similarity and variation. Yet, little…

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are capable of translating between multiple source and target languages. Despite various approaches to train such models, they have difficulty with zero-shot translation: translating…

Named-entities are inherently multilingual, and annotations in any given language may be limited. This motivates us to consider polyglot named-entity recognition (NER), where one model is trained using annotated data drawn from more than…

Multilingual pretrained language models (MPLMs) exhibit multilinguality and are well suited for transfer across languages. Most MPLMs are trained in an unsupervised fashion and the relationship between their objective and multilinguality is…

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) for low-resource languages (LRL) can be enhanced by the presence of related high-resource languages (HRL), but the relatedness of HRL usually relies on predefined linguistic assumptions about…

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained large popularity among Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers and practitioners. These models, trained on huge datasets, show proficiency across various languages and demonstrate…

We show that unsupervised sequence-segmentation performance can be transferred to extremely low-resource languages by pre-training a Masked Segmental Language Model (Downey et al., 2021) multilingually. Further, we show that this transfer…

Despite their popularity in non-English NLP, multilingual language models often underperform monolingual ones due to inter-language competition for model parameters. We propose Cross-lingual Expert Language Models (X-ELM), which mitigate…

The success of pretrained cross-lingual language models relies on two essential abilities, i.e., generalization ability for learning downstream tasks in a source language, and cross-lingual transferability for transferring the task…

We investigate how large language models perform on low-resource languages by benchmarking eight LLMs across five experimental conditions in English, Kazakh, and Mongolian. Using 50 hand-crafted questions spanning factual, reasoning,…

While multilingual large language models generally perform adequately, and sometimes even rival English performance on high-resource languages (HRLs), they often significantly underperform on low-resource languages (LRLs). Among several…

Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training…