Marcin Kadras


2019

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MultiFiT: Efficient Multi-lingual Language Model Fine-tuning
Julian Eisenschlos | Sebastian Ruder | Piotr Czapla | Marcin Kadras | Sylvain Gugger | Jeremy Howard
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Pretrained language models are promising particularly for low-resource languages as they only require unlabelled data. However, training existing models requires huge amounts of compute, while pretrained cross-lingual models often underperform on low-resource languages. We propose Multi-lingual language model Fine-Tuning (MultiFiT) to enable practitioners to train and fine-tune language models efficiently in their own language. In addition, we propose a zero-shot method using an existing pretrained cross-lingual model. We evaluate our methods on two widely used cross-lingual classification datasets where they outperform models pretrained on orders of magnitude more data and compute. We release all models and code.