Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer accuracy in low-resource languages: multilingual vs. English-only intermediate tasks

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 accuracy of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on XTREME-R compare when using multilingual intermediate tasks (e.g., XNLI) versus English-only intermediate tasks when the target language is low-resource?

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