mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs

Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Saksham Singhal, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Xia Song, Furu Wei


Abstract
Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on massive monolingual texts, which has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. In this paper, we improve multilingual text-to-text transfer Transformer with translation pairs (mT6). Specifically, we explore three cross-lingual text-to-text pre-training tasks, namely, machine translation, translation pair span corruption, and translation span corruption. In addition, we propose a partially non-autoregressive objective for text-to-text pre-training. We evaluate the methods on seven multilingual benchmark datasets, including sentence classification, named entity recognition, question answering, and abstractive summarization. Experimental results show that the proposed mT6 improves cross-lingual transferability over mT5.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.125
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1671–1683
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.125
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.125
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Saksham Singhal, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Xia Song, and Furu Wei. 2021. mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1671–1683, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs (Chi et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.125.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.125.mp4
Data
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