{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/cross-lingual-intermediate-fine-tuning","title":"Cross-lingual Intermediate Fine-tuning improves Dialogue State Tracking","arxiv_id":"2109.13620","date":"2021-09-28","proceeding":"EMNLP 2021 11","authors":["Nikita Moghe","Mark Steedman","Alexandra Birch"],"abstract":"Recent progress in task-oriented neural dialogue systems is largely focused on a handful of languages, as annotation of training data is tedious and expensive. Machine translation has been used to make systems multilingual, but this can introduce a pipeline of errors. Another promising solution is using cross-lingual transfer learning through pretrained multilingual models. Existing methods train multilingual models with additional code-mixed task data or refine the cross-lingual representations through parallel ontologies. In this work, we enhance the transfer learning process by intermediate fine-tuning of pretrained multilingual models, where the multilingual models are fine-tuned with different but related data and/or tasks. Specifically, we use parallel and conversational movie subtitles datasets to design cross-lingual intermediate tasks suitable for downstream dialogue tasks. We use only 200K lines of parallel data for intermediate fine-tuning which is already available for 1782 language pairs. We test our approach on the cross-lingual dialogue state tracking task for the parallel MultiWoZ (English -> Chinese, Chinese -> English) and Multilingual WoZ (English -> German, English -> Italian) datasets. We achieve impressive improvements (> 20% on joint goal accuracy) on the parallel MultiWoZ dataset and the Multilingual WoZ dataset over the vanilla baseline with only 10% of the target language task data and zero-shot setup respectively.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13620v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.13620v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"cross-lingual-intermediate-fine-tuning","repo_url":"https://github.com/nikitacs16/xlift_dst","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-lingual-transfer","task_name":"Cross-Lingual Transfer"},{"task_slug":"dialogue-state-tracking","task_name":"Dialogue State Tracking"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"test","method_name":"Test"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2109.13620","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}