Impact of Intermediate English Task Training on Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Performance of Multilingual Models

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: Does intermediate-task training on English tasks improve the zero-shot cross-lingual performance of multilingual models like XLM-R and mT5 on the XTREME-R benchmark when compared to direct fine-tuning, as measured by accuracy and F1 score?

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