@inproceedings{kurfali-ostling-2021-probing,
    title = "Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse",
    author = {Kurfal{\i}, Murathan  and
      {\"O}stling, Robert},
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Calixto, Iacer  and
      Vuli{\'c}, Ivan  and
      Saphra, Naomi  and
      Kassner, Nora  and
      Camburu, Oana-Maria  and
      Bansal, Trapit  and
      Shwartz, Vered",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.repl4nlp-1.2",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.repl4nlp-1.2",
    pages = "8--19",
    abstract = "Pre-trained multilingual language models have become an important building block in multilingual Natural Language Processing. In the present paper, we investigate a range of such models to find out how well they transfer discourse-level knowledge across languages. This is done with a systematic evaluation on a broader set of discourse-level tasks than has been previously been assembled. We find that the XLM-RoBERTa family of models consistently show the best performance, by simultaneously being good monolingual models and degrading relatively little in a zero-shot setting. Our results also indicate that model distillation may hurt the ability of cross-lingual transfer of sentence representations, while language dissimilarity at most has a modest effect. We hope that our test suite, covering 5 tasks with a total of 22 languages in 10 distinct families, will serve as a useful evaluation platform for multilingual performance at and beyond the sentence level.",
}