Large language models (LLMs) are very proficient text generators. We leverage this capability of LLMs to generate task-specific data via zero-shot prompting and promote cross-lingual transfer for low-resource target languages. Given task-specific data in a source language and a teacher model trained on this data, we propose using this teacher to label LLM generations and employ a set of simple data selection strategies that use the teacher’s label probabilities. Our data selection strategies help us identify a representative subset of diverse generations that help boost zero-shot accuracies while being efficient, in comparison to using all the LLM generations (without any subset selection). We also highlight other important design choices that affect cross-lingual performance such as the use of translations of source data and what labels are best to use for the LLM generations. We observe significant performance gains across sentiment analysis and natural language inference tasks (of up to a maximum of 7.13 absolute points and 1.5 absolute points on average) across a number of target languages (Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Swahili) and domains.

Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.

Multilingual pretrained models, while effective on monolingual data, need additional training to work well with code-switched text. In this work, we present a novel idea of training multilingual models with alignment objectives using parallel text so as to explicitly align word representations with the same underlying semantics across languages. Such an explicit alignment step has a positive downstream effect and improves performance on multiple code-switched NLP tasks. We explore two alignment strategies and report improvements of up to 7.32%, 0.76% and 1.9% on Hindi-English Sentiment Analysis, Named Entity Recognition and Question Answering tasks compared to a competitive baseline model.