Fine-tuning self-supervised pre-trained language models such as BERT has significantly improved state-of-the-art performance on natural language processing tasks. Similar finetuning setups can also be used in commercial large scale Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems to perform intent classification and slot tagging on user queries. Finetuning such powerful models for use in commercial systems requires large amounts of training data and compute resources to achieve high performance. This paper is a study on the different empirical methods of identifying training data redundancies for the fine tuning paradigm. Particularly, we explore rule based and semantic techniques to reduce data in a multilingual fine tuning setting and report our results on key SLU metrics. Through our experiments, we show that we can achieve on par/better performance on fine-tuning using a reduced data set as compared to a model finetuned on the entire data set.

Building machine learning models for low resource languages is extremely challenging due to the lack of available training data (either un-annotated or annotated). To support such scenarios, zero-shot cross lingual transfer is used where the machine learning model is trained on a resource rich language and is directly tested on the resource poor language. In this paper, we present a technique which improves the performance of zero-shot cross lingual transfer. Our method performs multi-task pre-finetuning on a resource rich language using a multilingual pre-trained model. The pre-finetuned model is then tested in a zero-shot manner on the resource poor languages. We test the performance of our method on 8 languages and for two tasks, namely, Intent Classification (IC) & Named Entity Recognition (NER) using the MultiAtis++ dataset. The results showed that our method improves IC performance in 7 out of 8 languages and NER performance in 4 languages. Our method also leads to faster convergence during finetuning. The usage of pre-finetuning demonstrates a data efficient way for supporting new languages and geographies across the world.