Papers › Bilingual Alignment Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Bilingual Alignment Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

3 Jun 2021EMNLP (MRQA) 2021 11arXiv:2106.01732archive 2025-07-28

Ziqing Yang, Wentao Ma, Yiming Cui, Jiani Ye, Wanxiang Che, Shijin Wang

Multilingual pre-trained models have achieved remarkable performance on cross-lingual transfer learning. Some multilingual models such as mBERT, have been pre-trained on unlabeled corpora, therefore the embeddings of different languages in the models may not be aligned very well. In this paper, we aim to improve the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance by proposing a pre-training task named Word-Exchange Aligning Model (WEAM), which uses the statistical alignment information as the prior knowledge to guide cross-lingual word prediction. We evaluate our model on multilingual machine reading comprehension task MLQA and natural language interface task XNLI. The results show that WEAM can significantly improve the zero-shot performance.

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Tasks

Cross-Lingual TransferLanguage ModellingMachine Reading ComprehensionReading ComprehensionTransfer LearningZero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

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Methods

mBERT

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