Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Cross-lingual Transfer

Haeji Jung, Changdae Oh, Jooeon Kang, Jimin Sohn, Kyungwoo Song, Jinkyu Kim, David R Mortensen


Abstract
Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. While there are efforts to align the languages in a single latent space to mitigate such gaps, how different input-level representations influence such gaps has not been investigated, particularly with phonemic inputs. We hypothesize that the performance gaps are affected by representation discrepancies between those languages, and revisit the use of phonemic representations as a means to mitigate these discrepancies.To demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representations, we present experiments on three representative cross-lingual tasks on 12 languages in total. The results show that phonemic representations exhibit higher similarities between languages compared to orthographic representations, and it consistently outperforms grapheme-based baseline model on languages that are relatively low-resourced.We present quantitative evidence from three cross-lingual tasks that demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representations, and it is further justified by a theoretical analysis of the cross-lingual performance gap.
Anthology ID:
2024.mrl-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024)
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Jonne Sälevä, Abraham Owodunni
Venue:
MRL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
200–211
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mrl-1.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haeji Jung, Changdae Oh, Jooeon Kang, Jimin Sohn, Kyungwoo Song, Jinkyu Kim, and David R Mortensen. 2024. Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Cross-lingual Transfer. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024), pages 200–211, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Cross-lingual Transfer (Jung et al., MRL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mrl-1.16.pdf