Multilingual Pretraining and Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-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 combination of English intermediate-task training with multilingual pretraining (e.g., mT5 vs. XLM-R) affect zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on XTREME-R, compared to models with only monolingual pretraining, as measured by retrieval F1 scores?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.2/10.