Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability

Yoshinari Fujinuma, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Katharina Kann


Abstract
Pretrained multilingual models enable zero-shot learning even for unseen languages, and that performance can be further improved via adaptation prior to finetuning. However, it is unclear how the number of pretraining languages influences a model’s zero-shot learning for languages unseen during pretraining. To fill this gap, we ask the following research questions: (1) How does the number of pretraining languages influence zero-shot performance on unseen target languages? (2) Does the answer to that question change with model adaptation? (3) Do the findings for our first question change if the languages used for pretraining are all related? Our experiments on pretraining with related languages indicate that choosing a diverse set of languages is crucial. Without model adaptation, surprisingly, increasing the number of pretraining languages yields better results up to adding related languages, after which performance plateaus. In contrast, with model adaptation via continued pretraining, pretraining on a larger number of languages often gives further improvement, suggesting that model adaptation is crucial to exploit additional pretraining languages.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.106
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1500–1512
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.106
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.106
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yoshinari Fujinuma, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Katharina Kann. 2022. Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1500–1512, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability (Fujinuma et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.106.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.106.mp4
Data
XNLI