Abstract
Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual in-context learning capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages and learn isolated distributions of multilingual sentence representations, which may hinder knowledge transfer across languages. To bridge this gap, we propose a simple yet effective cross-lingual alignment framework exploiting pairs of translation sentences. It aligns the internal sentence representations across different languages via multilingual contrastive learning and aligns outputs by following cross-lingual instructions in the target language. Experimental results show that even with less than 0.1\textperthousand of pre-training tokens, our alignment framework significantly boosts the cross-lingual abilities of generative language models and mitigates the performance gap. Further analyses reveal that it results in a better internal multilingual representation distribution of multilingual models.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.naacl-long.445
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8058–8076
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.445
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.445
- Cite (ACL):
- Chong Li, Shaonan Wang, Jiajun Zhang, and Chengqing Zong. 2024. Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8058–8076, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment (Li et al., NAACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.naacl-long.445.pdf