@inproceedings{cattan-etal-2021-usability,
    title = "On the Usability of Transformers-based Models for a {F}rench Question-Answering Task",
    author = "Cattan, Oralie  and
      Servan, Christophe  and
      Rosset, Sophie",
    editor = "Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Angelova, Galia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)",
    month = sep,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Held Online",
    publisher = "INCOMA Ltd.",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.ranlp-1.29/",
    pages = "244--255",
    abstract = "For many tasks, state-of-the-art results have been achieved with Transformer-based architectures, resulting in a paradigmatic shift in practices from the use of task-specific architectures to the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models. The ongoing trend consists in training models with an ever-increasing amount of data and parameters, which requires considerable resources. It leads to a strong search to improve resource efficiency based on algorithmic and hardware improvements evaluated only for English. This raises questions about their usability when applied to small-scale learning problems, for which a limited amount of training data is available, especially for under-resourced languages tasks. The lack of appropriately sized corpora is a hindrance to applying data-driven and transfer learning-based approaches with strong instability cases. In this paper, we establish a state-of-the-art of the efforts dedicated to the usability of Transformer-based models and propose to evaluate these improvements on the question-answering performances of French language which have few resources. We address the instability relating to data scarcity by investigating various training strategies with data augmentation, hyperparameters optimization and cross-lingual transfer. We also introduce a new compact model for French FrALBERT which proves to be competitive in low-resource settings."
}