Linguistic Distance Between Intermediate English Tasks and Target Low-Resource Languages in XTREME Performance Gains

Intermediate-task training---fine-tuning a pretrained model on an intermediate task before fine-tuning again on the target task---often improves model performance substantially on language understanding tasks in monolingual English settings. We investigate whether English intermediate-task training is still helpful on non-English target tasks. Using nine intermediate language-understanding tasks, we evaluate intermediate-task transfer in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting on the XTREME benchmark. We see large improvements from intermediate training on the BUCC and Tatoeba sentence retrieval tas

Research goal: How does the relative linguistic distance between the intermediate English task and the target low-resource language in XTREME affect the magnitude of performance improvement from intermediate-task training?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.5/10.