{"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/prompt-learning-to-mitigate-catastrophic","title":"Prompt Learning to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Cross-lingual Transfer for Open-domain Dialogue Generation","arxiv_id":"2305.07393","date":"2023-05-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lei Liu","Jimmy Xiangji Huang"],"abstract":"Dialogue systems for non-English languages have long been under-explored. In this paper, we take the first step to investigate few-shot cross-lingual transfer learning (FS-XLT) and multitask learning (MTL) in the context of open-domain dialogue generation for non-English languages with limited data. We observed catastrophic forgetting in both FS-XLT and MTL for all 6 languages in our preliminary experiments. To mitigate the issue, we propose a simple yet effective prompt learning approach that can preserve the multilinguality of multilingual pre-trained language model (mPLM) in FS-XLT and MTL by bridging the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning with Fixed-prompt LM Tuning and our hand-crafted prompts. Experimental results on all 6 languages in terms of both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/JeremyLeiLiu/XLinguDial.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07393v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.07393v2.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":"prompt-learning-to-mitigate-catastrophic","repo_url":"https://github.com/jeremyleiliu/xlingudial","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-lingual-transfer","task_name":"Cross-Lingual Transfer"},{"task_slug":"dialogue-generation","task_name":"Dialogue Generation"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"prompt-learning","task_name":"Prompt Learning"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}