Evaluating morphological typology in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer

Antonio Martínez-García, Toni Badia, Jeremy Barnes


Abstract
Cross-lingual transfer has improved greatly through multi-lingual language model pretraining, reducing the need for parallel data and increasing absolute performance. However, this progress has also brought to light the differences in performance across languages. Specifically, certain language families and typologies seem to consistently perform worse in these models. In this paper, we address what effects morphological typology has on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for two tasks: Part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We perform experiments on 19 languages from four language typologies (fusional, isolating, agglutinative, and introflexive) and find that transfer to another morphological type generally implies a higher loss than transfer to another language with the same morphological typology. Furthermore, POS tagging is more sensitive to morphological typology than sentiment analysis and, on this task, models perform much better on fusional languages than on the other typologies.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.244
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:
3136–3153
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.244
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.244
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antonio Martínez-García, Toni Badia, and Jeremy Barnes. 2021. Evaluating morphological typology in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. 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 3136–3153, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating morphological typology in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (Martínez-García et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.244.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.244.mp4