Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse

Murathan Kurfalı, Robert Östling


Abstract
Pre-trained multilingual language models have become an important building block in multilingual Natural Language Processing. In the present paper, we investigate a range of such models to find out how well they transfer discourse-level knowledge across languages. This is done with a systematic evaluation on a broader set of discourse-level tasks than has been previously been assembled. We find that the XLM-RoBERTa family of models consistently show the best performance, by simultaneously being good monolingual models and degrading relatively little in a zero-shot setting. Our results also indicate that model distillation may hurt the ability of cross-lingual transfer of sentence representations, while language dissimilarity at most has a modest effect. We hope that our test suite, covering 5 tasks with a total of 22 languages in 10 distinct families, will serve as a useful evaluation platform for multilingual performance at and beyond the sentence level.
Anthology ID:
2021.repl4nlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Iacer Calixto, Ivan Vulić, Naomi Saphra, Nora Kassner, Oana-Maria Camburu, Trapit Bansal, Vered Shwartz
Venue:
RepL4NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8–19
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.repl4nlp-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.repl4nlp-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Murathan Kurfalı and Robert Östling. 2021. Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021), pages 8–19, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse (Kurfalı & Östling, RepL4NLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.repl4nlp-1.2.pdf
Data
MultiNLISQuADXNLIXQuADx-stance