LEIA: Facilitating Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer in Language Models with Entity-based Data Augmentation

Ikuya Yamada, Ryokan Ri


Abstract
Adapting English-based large language models (LLMs) to other languages has become increasingly popular due to the efficiency and potential of cross-lingual transfer. However, existing language adaptation methods often overlook the benefits of cross-lingual supervision. In this study, we introduce LEIA, a language adaptation tuning method that utilizes Wikipedia entity names aligned across languages. This method involves augmenting the target language corpus with English entity names and training the model using left-to-right language modeling. We assess LEIA on diverse question answering datasets using 7B-parameter LLMs, demonstrating significant performance gains across various non-English languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.419
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7029–7039
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-acl.419/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.419
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ikuya Yamada and Ryokan Ri. 2024. LEIA: Facilitating Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer in Language Models with Entity-based Data Augmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7029–7039, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LEIA: Facilitating Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer in Language Models with Entity-based Data Augmentation (Yamada & Ri, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-acl.419.pdf