Multilingual vs. English-only Intermediate-task Training in Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer

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 performance of multilingual intermediate-task training compare to English-only intermediate-task training in few-shot cross-lingual transfer, as measured by accuracy improvements on XTREME-R benchmarks?

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