On the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual prototypical models across NLU tasks

Oralie Cattan, Sophie Rosset, Christophe Servan


Abstract
Supervised deep learning-based approaches have been applied to task-oriented dialog and have proven to be effective for limited domain and language applications when a sufficient number of training examples are available. In practice, these approaches suffer from the drawbacks of domain-driven design and under-resourced languages. Domain and language models are supposed to grow and change as the problem space evolves. On one hand, research on transfer learning has demonstrated the cross-lingual ability of multilingual Transformers-based models to learn semantically rich representations. On the other, in addition to the above approaches, meta-learning have enabled the development of task and language learning algorithms capable of far generalization. Through this context, this article proposes to investigate the cross-lingual transferability of using synergistically few-shot learning with prototypical neural networks and multilingual Transformers-based models. Experiments in natural language understanding tasks on MultiATIS++ corpus shows that our approach substantially improves the observed transfer learning performances between the low and the high resource languages. More generally our approach confirms that the meaningful latent space learned in a given language can be can be generalized to unseen and under-resourced ones using meta-learning.
Anthology ID:
2021.metanlp-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Meta Learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Mitra Mohtarami, Shang-Wen Li, Di Jin, Mandy Korpusik, Shuyan Dong, Ngoc Thang Vu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Venue:
MetaNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
36–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.metanlp-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.metanlp-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Oralie Cattan, Sophie Rosset, and Christophe Servan. 2021. On the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual prototypical models across NLU tasks. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Meta Learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing, pages 36–43, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual prototypical models across NLU tasks (Cattan et al., MetaNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.metanlp-1.5.pdf