ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corpora

Xuan Ouyang, Shuohuan Wang, Chao Pang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang


Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained cross-lingual models achieve impressive performance in downstream cross-lingual tasks. This improvement benefits from learning a large amount of monolingual and parallel corpora. Although it is generally acknowledged that parallel corpora are critical for improving the model performance, existing methods are often constrained by the size of parallel corpora, especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose Ernie-M, a new training method that encourages the model to align the representation of multiple languages with monolingual corpora, to overcome the constraint that the parallel corpus size places on the model performance. Our key insight is to integrate back-translation into the pre-training process. We generate pseudo-parallel sentence pairs on a monolingual corpus to enable the learning of semantic alignments between different languages, thereby enhancing the semantic modeling of cross-lingual models. Experimental results show that Ernie-M outperforms existing cross-lingual models and delivers new state-of-the-art results in various cross-lingual downstream tasks. The codes and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.3
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:
27–38
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuan Ouyang, Shuohuan Wang, Chao Pang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, and Haifeng Wang. 2021. ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corpora. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 27–38, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corpora (Ouyang et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.3.mp4
Code
 PaddlePaddle/ERNIE +  additional community code
Data
MLQAXTREME