In this work, we present an information-theoretic framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. The unified view helps us to better understand the existing methods for learning cross-lingual representations. More importantly, inspired by the framework, we propose a new pre-training task based on contrastive learning. Specifically, we regard a bilingual sentence pair as two views of the same meaning and encourage their encoded representations to be more similar than the negative examples. By leveraging both monolingual and parallel corpora, we jointly train the pretext tasks to improve the cross-lingual transferability of pre-trained models. Experimental results on several benchmarks show that our approach achieves considerably better performance. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/infoxlm.
@article{arxiv.2007.07834,
title = {InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training},
author = {Zewen Chi and Li Dong and Furu Wei and Nan Yang and Saksham Singhal and Wenhui Wang and Xia Song and Xian-Ling Mao and Heyan Huang and Ming Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.07834},
year = {2021}
}