Abstract
The world’s more than 7000 languages are written in at least 293 scripts. Due to various reasons, many closely related languages use different scripts, which poses a difficulty for multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) in learning crosslingual knowledge through lexical overlap. As a consequence, mPLMs are faced with a script barrier: representations from different scripts are located in different subspaces, which can result in crosslingual transfer involving languages of different scripts performing suboptimally. To address this problem, we propose TransliCo, a framework that optimizes the Transliteration Contrastive Modeling (TCM) objective to fine-tune an mPLM by contrasting sentences in its training data and their transliterations in a unified script (in our case Latin), which enhances uniformity in the representation space for different scripts. Using Glot500-m, an mPLM pretrained on over 500 languages, as our source model, we fine-tune it on a small portion (5%) of its training data, and refer to the resulting model as Furina. We show that Furina not only better aligns representations from distinct scripts but also outperforms the original Glot500-m on various zero-shot crosslingual transfer tasks. Additionally, we achieve consistent improvement in a case study on the Indic group where the languages exhibit areal features but use different scripts. We make our code and models publicly available.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.136
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2476–2499
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.136
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yihong Liu, Chunlan Ma, Haotian Ye, and Hinrich Schuetze. 2024. TransliCo: A Contrastive Learning Framework to Address the Script Barrier in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2476–2499, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TransliCo: A Contrastive Learning Framework to Address the Script Barrier in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models (Liu et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.136.pdf