Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training

Jiali Zeng, Yufan Jiang, Yongjing Yin, Yi Jing, Fandong Meng, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Jie Zhou


Abstract
Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typologyfrom the source language or when pre-training data is limited in size. In this paper, we propose XLM-P, a method that contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. Our space-efficient and model-agnostic XLM-P approach enables (1) lightweight modeling of language-invariant and language-specific knowledge across languages, and (2) easy integration with other multilingual pre-training methods. On the tasks of XTREME, which include text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval, both base- and large-size language models pre-trained with our proposed method exhibit consistent performance improvement. Furthermore, it provides substantial advantages for low-resource languages in unsupervised sentence retrieval and for target languages that differ greatly from the source language in cross-lingual transfer.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.388
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7021–7035
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.388
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.388
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiali Zeng, Yufan Jiang, Yongjing Yin, Yi Jing, Fandong Meng, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, and Jie Zhou. 2023. Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7021–7035, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training (Zeng et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.388.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.388.mp4