Exploiting Language Relatedness for Low Web-Resource Language Model Adaptation: An Indic Languages Study

Yash Khemchandani, Sarvesh Mehtani, Vaidehi Patil, Abhijeet Awasthi, Partha Talukdar, Sunita Sarawagi


Abstract
Recent research in multilingual language models (LM) has demonstrated their ability to effectively handle multiple languages in a single model. This holds promise for low web-resource languages (LRL) as multilingual models can enable transfer of supervision from high resource languages to LRLs. However, incorporating a new language in an LM still remains a challenge, particularly for languages with limited corpora and in unseen scripts. In this paper we argue that relatedness among languages in a language family may be exploited to overcome some of the corpora limitations of LRLs, and propose RelateLM. We focus on Indian languages, and exploit relatedness along two dimensions: (1) script (since many Indic scripts originated from the Brahmic script), and (2) sentence structure. RelateLM uses transliteration to convert the unseen script of limited LRL text into the script of a Related Prominent Language (RPL) (Hindi in our case). While exploiting similar sentence structures, RelateLM utilizes readily available bilingual dictionaries to pseudo translate RPL text into LRL corpora. Experiments on multiple real-world benchmark datasets provide validation to our hypothesis that using a related language as pivot, along with transliteration and pseudo translation based data augmentation, can be an effective way to adapt LMs for LRLs, rather than direct training or pivoting through English.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.105
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1312–1323
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.105
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.105
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yash Khemchandani, Sarvesh Mehtani, Vaidehi Patil, Abhijeet Awasthi, Partha Talukdar, and Sunita Sarawagi. 2021. Exploiting Language Relatedness for Low Web-Resource Language Model Adaptation: An Indic Languages Study. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1312–1323, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploiting Language Relatedness for Low Web-Resource Language Model Adaptation: An Indic Languages Study (Khemchandani et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.105.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-long.105.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.105.mp4
Code
 yashkhem1/RelateLM