English Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer 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: What is the impact of mixing English intermediate-task training with small amounts of non-English target-task data on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance, as evaluated by F1 scores on XTREME tasks compared to pure zero-shot transfer?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.8/10.