Giri Anantharaman


2021

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Larger-Scale Transformers for Multilingual Masked Language Modeling
Naman Goyal | Jingfei Du | Myle Ott | Giri Anantharaman | Alexis Conneau
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)

Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of cross-lingual language model pretraining for cross-lingual understanding. In this study, we present the results of two larger multilingual masked language models, with 3.5B and 10.7B parameters. Our two new models dubbed and outperform XLM-R by 1.8% and 2.4% average accuracy on XNLI. Our model also outperforms the RoBERTa-Large model on several English tasks of the GLUE benchmark by 0.3% on average while handling 99 more languages. This suggests larger capacity models for language understanding may obtain strong performance on high-resource languages while greatly improving low-resource languages. We make our code and models publicly available.