Papers › Efficient Test Time Adapter Ensembling for Low-resource Language Varieties

Efficient Test Time Adapter Ensembling for Low-resource Language Varieties

10 Sep 2021Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11arXiv:2109.04877archive 2025-07-28

Xinyi Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sebastian Ruder, Graham Neubig

Adapters are light-weight modules that allow parameter-efficient fine-tuning of pretrained models. Specialized language and task adapters have recently been proposed to facilitate cross-lingual transfer of multilingual pretrained models (Pfeiffer et al., 2020b). However, this approach requires training a separate language adapter for every language one wishes to support, which can be impractical for languages with limited data. An intuitive solution is to use a related language adapter for the new language variety, but we observe that this solution can lead to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we aim to improve the robustness of language adapters to uncovered languages without training new adapters. We find that ensembling multiple existing language adapters makes the fine-tuned model significantly more robust to other language varieties not included in these adapters. Building upon this observation, we propose Entropy Minimized Ensemble of Adapters (EMEA), a method that optimizes the ensemble weights of the pretrained language adapters for each test sentence by minimizing the entropy of its predictions. Experiments on three diverse groups of language varieties show that our method leads to significant improvements on both named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging across all languages.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

cindyxinyiwang/emea officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubjax report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Cross-Lingual TransferNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)Part-Of-Speech TaggingSentencenamed-entity-recognitionparameter-efficient fine-tuning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: EMEA

AdapterEMEA

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections