Impact of Combined English and Multilingual Intermediate-Task Training on Cross-Lingual Transfer Performance

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 intermediate-task training on cross-lingual transfer performance, as measured by F1 score on XQuAD, and how does this compare to a baseline of no intermediate-task training?

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