Investigating Zero-shot Cross-lingual Language Understanding for Arabic

Zaid Alyafeai, Moataz Ahmed


Abstract
Numerous languages exhibit shared characteristics, especially in morphological features. For instance, Arabic and Russian both belong to the fusional language category. The question arises: Do such common traits influence language comprehension across diverse linguistic backgrounds? This study explores the possibility of transferring comprehension skills across languages to Arabic in a zero-shot scenario. Specifically, we demonstrate that training language models on other languages can enhance comprehension of Arabic, as evidenced by our evaluations in three key tasks: natural language inference, question answering, and named entity recognition. Our experiments reveal that certain morphologically rich languages (MRLs), such as Russian, display similarities to Arabic when assessed in a zero-shot context, particularly in tasks like question answering and natural language inference. However, this similarity is less pronounced in tasks like named entity recognition.
Anthology ID:
2023.arabicnlp-1.26
Volume:
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore (Hybrid)
Editors:
Hassan Sawaf, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Walid Magdy, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Nizar Habash, Salam Khalifa, Amr Keleg, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Khalil Mrini, Rawan Almatham
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
324–334
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.26
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.arabicnlp-1.26
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zaid Alyafeai and Moataz Ahmed. 2023. Investigating Zero-shot Cross-lingual Language Understanding for Arabic. In Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023, pages 324–334, Singapore (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Zero-shot Cross-lingual Language Understanding for Arabic (Alyafeai & Ahmed, ArabicNLP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.26.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.26.mp4