Related papers: Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual …
Multilingual language models were shown to allow for nontrivial transfer across scripts and languages. In this work, we study the structure of the internal representations that enable this transfer. We focus on the representation of gender…
Cross-lingual transfer is a leading technique for parsing low-resource languages in the absence of explicit supervision. Simple `direct transfer' of a learned model based on a multilingual input encoding has provided a strong benchmark.…
Multilingual pre-trained models (mPLMs) have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual transfer tasks. However, the transfer performance is often hindered when a low-resource target language is written in a different script than the…
Multilingual pre-trained language models transfer remarkably well on cross-lingual downstream tasks. However, the extent to which they learn language-neutral representations (i.e., shared representations that encode similar phenomena across…
In this work, we analyze shortcomings in cross-lingual knowledge transfer in large, modern reasoning LLMs. We demonstrate that the perceived gap in knowledge transfer is primarily a script barrier. First, we conduct an observational data…
Multilingual language models achieve impressive zero-shot accuracies in many languages in complex tasks such as Natural Language Inference (NLI). Examples in NLI (and equivalent complex tasks) often pertain to various types of sub-tasks,…
Zero-resource cross-lingual transfer approaches aim to apply supervised models from a source language to unlabelled target languages. In this paper we perform an in-depth study of the two main techniques employed so far for cross-lingual…
One of the challenges with finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is that their tokenizer is optimized for the language(s) it was pretrained on, but brittle when it comes to previously unseen variations in the data. This can for…
Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect…
Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in…
The emergent cross-lingual transfer seen in multilingual pretrained models has sparked significant interest in studying their behavior. However, because these analyses have focused on fully trained multilingual models, little is known about…
Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) are jointly trained on data from many different languages such that representation of individual languages can benefit from other languages' data. Impressive performance on zero-shot cross-lingual…
We study the problem of multilingual masked language modeling, i.e. the training of a single model on concatenated text from multiple languages, and present a detailed study of several factors that influence why these models are so…
Transfer learning between different language pairs has shown its effectiveness for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in low-resource scenario. However, existing transfer methods involving a common target language are far from success in the…
Transfer learning has led to large gains in performance for nearly all NLP tasks while making downstream models easier and faster to train. This has also been extended to low-resourced languages, with some success. We investigate the…
Using task-specific pre-training and leveraging cross-lingual transfer are two of the most popular ways to handle code-switched data. In this paper, we aim to compare the effects of both for the task of sentiment analysis. We work with two…
Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) benefits from knowledge transfer across different language pairs. However, improvements in one-to-many translation compared to many-to-one translation are only marginal and sometimes even negligible.…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. In this paper, we closely examine the reasons behind this phenomenon, focusing on the pre-training…
We train a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew language model using a transliterated version of Arabic texts in Hebrew, to ensure both languages are represented in the same script. Given the morphological, structural similarities, and the extensive…
Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such…