Impact of English Intermediate-Task Training on Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Performance in Multilingual Pretraining

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 combining English intermediate-task training with multilingual pretraining (e.g., mBERT, XLM-R) on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance, as measured by accuracy on XTREME-R tasks compared to multilingual pretraining alone?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.0/10.