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Despite the centrality of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) to bilingualism research, human studies often yield conflicting results due to inherent experimental variance. We address these inconsistencies by using language models (LMs) as…

Most Transformer language models are primarily pretrained on English text, limiting their use for other languages. As the model sizes grow, the performance gap between English and other languages with fewer compute and data resources…

BERT-based models are currently used for solving nearly all Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and most often achieve state-of-the-art results. Therefore, the NLP community conducts extensive research on understanding these models, but…

It is reasonable to hypothesize that the divergence patterns formulated by historical linguists and typologists reflect constraints on human languages, and are thus consistent with Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in a certain way. In this…

In recent years, transformer models have achieved great success in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Most of the current state-of-the-art NLP results are achieved by using monolingual transformer models, where the model is…

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…

Typically, spoken language understanding (SLU) models are trained on annotated data which are costly to gather. Aiming to reduce data needs for bootstrapping a SLU system for a new language, we present a simple but effective weight transfer…

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex and dynamic process. Many SLA studies that have attempted to record and analyze this process have typically focused on a single modality (e.g., textual output of learners), covered only a short…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advances in recent years, particularly with the emergence of Large Language Models that have achieved unprecedented performance across many tasks. However, these developments have mainly…

Multilingual models, such as M-BERT and XLM-R, have gained increasing popularity, due to their zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities. However, their generalization ability is still inconsistent for typologically diverse…

Language model pre-training has shown promising results in various downstream tasks. In this context, we introduce a cross-modal pre-trained language model, called Speech-Text BERT (ST-BERT), to tackle end-to-end spoken language…

This paper investigates the problem of learning cross-lingual representations in a contextual space. We propose Cross-Lingual BERT Transformation (CLBT), a simple and efficient approach to generate cross-lingual contextualized word…

Multilingual pre-trained language models, such as mBERT and XLM-R, have shown impressive cross-lingual ability. Surprisingly, both of them use multilingual masked language model (MLM) without any cross-lingual supervision or aligned data.…

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 work has exhibited the surprising cross-lingual abilities of multilingual BERT (M-BERT) -- surprising since it is trained without any cross-lingual objective and with no aligned data. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of…

We evaluate whether BERT, a widely used neural network for sentence processing, acquires an inductive bias towards forming structural generalizations through pretraining on raw data. We conduct four experiments testing its preference for…

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily…

We study the selection of transfer languages for automatic abusive language detection. Instead of preparing a dataset for every language, we demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for zero-shot abusive language…

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is an important feature in modern NLP models and architectures to support low-resource languages. In this work, We study zero-shot cross-lingual transfer from English to French and German under Multi-Label…

This paper addresses the question as to what degree a BERT-based multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) model can transfer knowledge across languages. Through experiments we will show that, although it works substantially well…