Machine-Created Universal Language for Cross-lingual Transfer

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13071v2
• Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2023 03:20:13 GMT
• Title: Machine-Created Universal Language for Cross-lingual Transfer
• Authors: Yaobo Liang, Quanzhi Zhu, Junhe Zhao and Nan Duan
• Abstract summary: We propose a new Machine-created Universal Language (MUL) as an alternative intermediate language. MUL comprises a set of discrete symbols forming a universal vocabulary and a natural language to MUL translator. MUL unifies shared concepts from various languages into a single universal word, enhancing cross-language transfer.
• Score: 73.44138687502294
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: There are two primary approaches to addressing cross-lingual transfer: multilingual pre-training, which implicitly aligns the hidden representations of various languages, and translate-test, which explicitly translates different languages into an intermediate language, such as English. Translate-test offers better interpretability compared to multilingual pre-training. However, it has lower performance than multilingual pre-training(Conneau and Lample, 2019; Conneau et al, 2020) and struggles with word-level tasks due to translation altering word order. As a result, we propose a new Machine-created Universal Language (MUL) as an alternative intermediate language. MUL comprises a set of discrete symbols forming a universal vocabulary and a natural language to MUL translator for converting multiple natural languages to MUL. MUL unifies shared concepts from various languages into a single universal word, enhancing cross-language transfer. Additionally, MUL retains language-specific words and word order, allowing the model to be easily applied to word-level tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that translating into MUL yields improved performance compared to multilingual pre-training, and our analysis indicates that MUL possesses strong interpretability. The code is at: https://github.com/microsoft/Unicoder/tree/master/MCUL.

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