Domain-Specific Intermediate Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in XLM-R on XTREME

Pre-trained multilingual language encoders, such as multilingual BERT and XLM-R, show great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. However, these multilingual encoders do not precisely align words and phrases across languages. Especially, learning alignments in the multilingual embedding space usually requires sentence-level or word-level parallel corpora, which are expensive to be obtained for low-resource languages. An alternative is to make the multilingual encoders more robust; when fine-tuning the encoder using downstream task, we train the encoder to tolerate noise in the contex

Research goal: How does domain-specific intermediate task training (e.g., biomedical vs. general) affect zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance of XLM-R on XTREME subtasks, measured by accuracy and F1-score in low-resource languages?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.0/10.