Beyond English-Centric Bitexts for Better Multilingual Language Representation Learning

Barun Patra, Saksham Singhal, Shaohan Huang, Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song


Abstract
In this paper, we elaborate upon recipes for building multilingual representation models that are not only competitive with existing state-of-the-art models but are also more parameter efficient, thereby promoting better adoption in resource-constrained scenarios and practical applications. We show that going beyond English-centric bitexts, coupled with a novel sampling strategy aimed at reducing under-utilization of training data, substantially boosts performance across model sizes for both Electra and MLM pre-training objectives. We introduce XY-LENT: X-Y bitext enhanced Language ENcodings using Transformers which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance over 5 cross-lingual tasks within all model size bands, is also competitive across bands. Our XY-LENT XL variant outperforms XLM-R XXL and exhibits competitive performance with mT5 XXL while being 5x and 6x smaller respectively. We then show that our proposed method helps ameliorate the curse of multilinguality, with the XY-LENT XL achieving 99.3% GLUE performance and 98.5% SQuAD 2.0 performance compared to a SoTA English only model in the same size band. We then analyze our models performance on extremely low resource languages and posit that scaling alone may not be sufficient for improving the performance in this scenario
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.856
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15354–15373
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.856
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.856
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Barun Patra, Saksham Singhal, Shaohan Huang, Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Vishrav Chaudhary, and Xia Song. 2023. Beyond English-Centric Bitexts for Better Multilingual Language Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15354–15373, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond English-Centric Bitexts for Better Multilingual Language Representation Learning (Patra et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.acl-long.856.pdf