Lightweight Cross-Lingual Sentence Representation Learning

Zhuoyuan Mao, Prakhar Gupta, Chenhui Chu, Martin Jaggi, Sadao Kurohashi


Abstract
Large-scale models for learning fixed-dimensional cross-lingual sentence representations like LASER (Artetxe and Schwenk, 2019b) lead to significant improvement in performance on downstream tasks. However, further increases and modifications based on such large-scale models are usually impractical due to memory limitations. In this work, we introduce a lightweight dual-transformer architecture with just 2 layers for generating memory-efficient cross-lingual sentence representations. We explore different training tasks and observe that current cross-lingual training tasks leave a lot to be desired for this shallow architecture. To ameliorate this, we propose a novel cross-lingual language model, which combines the existing single-word masked language model with the newly proposed cross-lingual token-level reconstruction task. We further augment the training task by the introduction of two computationally-lite sentence-level contrastive learning tasks to enhance the alignment of cross-lingual sentence representation space, which compensates for the learning bottleneck of the lightweight transformer for generative tasks. Our comparisons with competing models on cross-lingual sentence retrieval and multilingual document classification confirm the effectiveness of the newly proposed training tasks for a shallow model.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.226
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:
2902–2913
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.226
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.226
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhuoyuan Mao, Prakhar Gupta, Chenhui Chu, Martin Jaggi, and Sadao Kurohashi. 2021. Lightweight Cross-Lingual Sentence Representation Learning. 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 2902–2913, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lightweight Cross-Lingual Sentence Representation Learning (Mao et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.226.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.226.mp4
Code
 Mao-KU/lightweight-crosslingual-sent2vec
Data
MLDocParaCrawl