Granularity Effects in Multilingual Zero-Shot Retrieval Performance

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 granularity of intermediate tasks (e.g., fine-grained vs. coarse-grained) impact the zero-shot performance of multilingual models on XTREME-Retrieval when compared to English-only intermediate tasks?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.0/10.