Learning Disentangled Semantic Representations for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension

Linjuan Wu, Shaojuan Wu, Xiaowang Zhang, Deyi Xiong, Shizhan Chen, Zhiqiang Zhuang, Zhiyong Feng


Abstract
Multilingual pre-trained models are able to zero-shot transfer knowledge from rich-resource to low-resource languages in machine reading comprehension (MRC). However, inherent linguistic discrepancies in different languages could make answer spans predicted by zero-shot transfer violate syntactic constraints of the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual MRC framework equipped with a Siamese Semantic Disentanglement Model (S2DM) to disassociate semantics from syntax in representations learned by multilingual pre-trained models. To explicitly transfer only semantic knowledge to the target language, we propose two groups of losses tailored for semantic and syntactic encoding and disentanglement. Experimental results on three multilingual MRC datasets (i.e., XQuAD, MLQA, and TyDi QA) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over models based on mBERT and XLM-100.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
991–1000
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.70
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.70
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linjuan Wu, Shaojuan Wu, Xiaowang Zhang, Deyi Xiong, Shizhan Chen, Zhiqiang Zhuang, and Zhiyong Feng. 2022. Learning Disentangled Semantic Representations for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 991–1000, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Disentangled Semantic Representations for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (Wu et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.acl-long.70.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.70.software.zip
Code
 wulinjuan/ssdm_mrc
Data
BiPaRTyDiQATyDiQA-GoldPXQuAD