Abstract
Cross-lingual transfer learning with large multilingual pre-trained models can be an effective approach for low-resource languages with no labeled training data. Existing evaluations of zero-shot cross-lingual generalisability of large pre-trained models use datasets with English training data, and test data in a selection of target languages. We explore a more extensive transfer learning setup with 65 different source languages and 105 target languages for part-of-speech tagging. Through our analysis, we show that pre-training of both source and target language, as well as matching language families, writing systems, word order systems, and lexical-phonetic distance significantly impact cross-lingual performance. The findings described in this paper can be used as indicators of which factors are important for effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to zero- and low-resource languages.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-long.529
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7676–7685
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.529
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.529
- Cite (ACL):
- Wietse de Vries, Martijn Wieling, and Malvina Nissim. 2022. Make the Best of Cross-lingual Transfer: Evidence from POS Tagging with over 100 Languages. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7676–7685, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Make the Best of Cross-lingual Transfer: Evidence from POS Tagging with over 100 Languages (de Vries et al., ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2022.acl-long.529.pdf
- Code
- wietsedv/xpos