Cross-lingual Transfer Performance Variations in Multilingual Models via Intermediate Task Selection

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 choice of English intermediate tasks (e.g., NLI, QA) affect the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance of multilingual models on XTREME-R when compared to multilingual intermediate tasks, as measured by accuracy differences across languages?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.7/10.