Related papers: To What Degree Can Language Borders Be Blurred In …

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…

Multi-lingual language models (LM), such as mBERT, XLM-R, mT5, mBART, have been remarkably successful in enabling natural language tasks in low-resource languages through cross-lingual transfer from high-resource ones. In this work, we try…

The growing interest in argument mining and computational argumentation brings with it a plethora of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks and corresponding datasets. However, as with many other NLU tasks, the dominant language is…

Recent advances, such as GPT and BERT, have shown success in incorporating a pre-trained transformer language model and fine-tuning operation to improve downstream NLP systems. However, this framework still has some fundamental problems in…

Speech is one of the most effective means of communication and is full of information that helps the transmission of utterer's thoughts. However, mainly due to the cumbersome processing of acoustic features, phoneme or word posterior…

Transfer learning based on pretraining language models on a large amount of raw data has become a new norm to reach state-of-the-art performance in NLP. Still, it remains unclear how this approach should be applied for unseen languages that…

We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) requires a model to analyze input acoustic signal to understand its linguistic content and make predictions. To boost the models' performance, various pre-training methods have been proposed to learn rich…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are a core component of voice assistants (VA), such as Alexa, Bixby, and Google Assistant. In this paper, we introduce a pipeline designed to extend SLU systems to new languages, utilizing Large…

Although Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved human-like performance for a few languages, the majority of the world's languages do not have usable systems due to the lack of large speech datasets to train these models.…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a task aiming to extract high-level semantics from spoken utterances. Previous works have investigated the use of speech self-supervised models and textual pre-trained models, which have shown…

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…

While recent work on multilingual language models has demonstrated their capacity for cross-lingual zero-shot transfer on downstream tasks, there is a lack of consensus in the community as to what shared properties between languages enable…

This work investigates spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in the scenario when the semantic information is extracted directly from the speech signal by means of a single end-to-end neural network model. Two SLU tasks are…

We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the mBERT representations. We 1) employ the language distances to infer and…

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…

Pre-trained language models (LMs) encode rich information about linguistic structure but their knowledge about lexical polysemy remains unclear. We propose a novel experimental setup for analysing this knowledge in LMs specifically trained…

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,…

It has been shown that multilingual BERT (mBERT) yields high quality multilingual representations and enables effective zero-shot transfer. This is surprising given that mBERT does not use any crosslingual signal during training. While…

Pre-trained language models have revolutionized the natural language understanding landscape, most notably BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). However, a significant challenge remains for low-resource languages,…