We show that unsupervised sequence-segmentation performance can be transferred to extremely low-resource languages by pre-training a Masked Segmental Language Model (Downey et al., 2021) multilingually. Further, we show that this transfer can be achieved by training over a collection of low-resource languages that are typologically similar (but phylogenetically unrelated) to the target language. In our experiments, we transfer from a collection of 10 Indigenous American languages (AmericasNLP, Mager et al., 2021) to K’iche’, a Mayan language. We compare our multilingual model to a monolingual (from-scratch) baseline, as well as a model pre-trained on Quechua only. We show that the multilingual pre-trained approach yields consistent segmentation quality across target dataset sizes, exceeding the monolingual baseline in 6/10 experimental settings. Our model yields especially strong results at small target sizes, including a zero-shot performance of 20.6 F1. These results have promising implications for low-resource NLP pipelines involving human-like linguistic units, such as the sparse transcription framework proposed by Bird (2020).

We present three Natural Language Inference (NLI) challenge sets that can evaluate NLI models on their understanding of temporal expressions. More specifically, we probe these models for three temporal properties: (a) the order between points in time, (b) the duration between two points in time, (c) the relation between the magnitude of times specified in different units. We find that although large language models fine-tuned on MNLI have some basic perception of the order between points in time, at large, these models do not have a thorough understanding of the relation between temporal expressions.