Oolong: Investigating What Makes Transfer Learning Hard with Controlled Studies

Zhengxuan Wu, Alex Tamkin, Isabel Papadimitriou


Abstract
When we transfer a pretrained language model to a new language, there are many axes of variation that change at once. To disentangle the impact of different factors like syntactic similarity and vocabulary similarity, we propose a set of controlled transfer studies: we systematically transform the language of the GLUE benchmark, altering one axis of crosslingual variation at a time, and then measure the resulting drops in a pretrained model’s downstream performance. We find that models can largely recover from syntactic-style shifts, but cannot recover from vocabulary misalignment and embedding matrix re-initialization, even with continued pretraining on 15 million tokens. Moreover, good-quality tokenizers in the transfer language do not make vocabulary alignment easier. Our experiments provide insights into the factors of cross-lingual transfer that researchers should most focus on when designing language transfer scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.198
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3280–3289
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.198
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.198
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengxuan Wu, Alex Tamkin, and Isabel Papadimitriou. 2023. Oolong: Investigating What Makes Transfer Learning Hard with Controlled Studies. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3280–3289, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Oolong: Investigating What Makes Transfer Learning Hard with Controlled Studies (Wu et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.198.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.198.mp4