Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer through Subtree-Aware Word Reordering

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13583v1
• Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:25:53 GMT
• Title: Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer through Subtree-Aware Word Reordering
• Authors: Ofir Arviv, Dmitry Nikolaev, Taelin Karidi and Omri Abend
• Abstract summary: One obstacle for effective cross-lingual transfer is variability in word-order patterns. We present a new powerful reordering method, defined in terms of Universal Dependencies. We show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines over different language pairs and model architectures.
• Score: 17.166996956587155
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Despite the impressive growth of the abilities of multilingual language models, such as XLM-R and mT5, it has been shown that they still face difficulties when tackling typologically-distant languages, particularly in the low-resource setting. One obstacle for effective cross-lingual transfer is variability in word-order patterns. It can be potentially mitigated via source- or target-side word reordering, and numerous approaches to reordering have been proposed. However, they rely on language-specific rules, work on the level of POS tags, or only target the main clause, leaving subordinate clauses intact. To address these limitations, we present a new powerful reordering method, defined in terms of Universal Dependencies, that is able to learn fine-grained word-order patterns conditioned on the syntactic context from a small amount of annotated data and can be applied at all levels of the syntactic tree. We conduct experiments on a diverse set of tasks and show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines over different language pairs and model architectures. This performance advantage holds true in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.

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