Dan Malkin


2023

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You Can Have Your Data and Balance It Too: Towards Balanced and Efficient Multilingual Models
Tomasz Limisiewicz | Dan Malkin | Gabriel Stanovsky
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

Multilingual models have been widely used for the cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. However, the performance on these languages is hindered by their under-representation in the pretraining data. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel multilingual training technique based on teacher-student knowledge distillation. In this setting, we utilize monolingual teacher models optimized for their language. We use those teachers along with balanced (sub-sampled) data to distill the teachers’ knowledge into a single multilingual student. Our method outperforms standard training methods in low-resource languages and retains performance on high-resource languages while using the same amount of data. If applied widely, our approach can increase the representation of low-resource languages in NLP systems.

2022

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A Balanced Data Approach for Evaluating Cross-Lingual Transfer: Mapping the Linguistic Blood Bank
Dan Malkin | Tomasz Limisiewicz | Gabriel Stanovsky
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We show that the choice of pretraining languages affects downstream cross-lingual transfer for BERT-based models. We inspect zero-shot performance in balanced data conditions to mitigate data size confounds, classifying pretraining languages that improve downstream performance as donors, and languages that are improved in zero-shot performance as recipients. We develop a method of quadratic time complexity in the number of languages to estimate these relations, instead of an exponential exhaustive computation of all possible combinations. We find that our method is effective on a diverse set of languages spanning different linguistic features and two downstream tasks. Our findings can inform developers of large-scale multilingual language models in choosing better pretraining configurations.