Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale. Conneau, A., Khandelwal, K., Goyal, N., Chaudhary, V., Wenzek, G., Guzmán, F., Grave, E., Ott, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Stoyanov, V. nov, 2019.
Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
This paper shows that pretraining multilingual language models at scale leads to significant performance gains for a wide range of cross-lingual transfer tasks. We train a Transformer-based masked language model on one hundred languages, using more than two terabytes of filtered CommonCrawl data. Our model, dubbed XLM-R, significantly outperforms multilingual BERT (mBERT) on a variety of cross-lingual benchmarks, including +13.8% average accuracy on XNLI, +12.3% average F1 score on MLQA, and +2.1% average F1 score on NER. XLM-R performs particularly well on low-resource languages, improving 11.8% in XNLI accuracy for Swahili and 9.2% for Urdu over the previous XLM model. We also present a detailed empirical evaluation of the key factors that are required to achieve these gains, including the trade-offs between (1) positive transfer and capacity dilution and (2) the performance of high and low resource languages at scale. Finally, we show, for the first time, the possibility of multilingual modeling without sacrificing per-language performance; XLM-Ris very competitive with strong monolingual models on the GLUE and XNLI benchmarks. We will make XLM-R code, data, and models publicly available.
@article{Conneau2019,
abstract = {This paper shows that pretraining multilingual language models at scale leads to significant performance gains for a wide range of cross-lingual transfer tasks. We train a Transformer-based masked language model on one hundred languages, using more than two terabytes of filtered CommonCrawl data. Our model, dubbed XLM-R, significantly outperforms multilingual BERT (mBERT) on a variety of cross-lingual benchmarks, including +13.8% average accuracy on XNLI, +12.3% average F1 score on MLQA, and +2.1% average F1 score on NER. XLM-R performs particularly well on low-resource languages, improving 11.8% in XNLI accuracy for Swahili and 9.2% for Urdu over the previous XLM model. We also present a detailed empirical evaluation of the key factors that are required to achieve these gains, including the trade-offs between (1) positive transfer and capacity dilution and (2) the performance of high and low resource languages at scale. Finally, we show, for the first time, the possibility of multilingual modeling without sacrificing per-language performance; XLM-Ris very competitive with strong monolingual models on the GLUE and XNLI benchmarks. We will make XLM-R code, data, and models publicly available.},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
arxivId = {1911.02116},
author = {Conneau, Alexis and Khandelwal, Kartikay and Goyal, Naman and Chaudhary, Vishrav and Wenzek, Guillaume and Guzm{\'{a}}n, Francisco and Grave, Edouard and Ott, Myle and Zettlemoyer, Luke and Stoyanov, Veselin},
eprint = {1911.02116},
file = {:Users/shanest/Documents/Library/Conneau et al/Unknown/Conneau et al. - 2019 - Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale.pdf:pdf},
keywords = {method: cross-linguistic,model},
month = {nov},
title = {{Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale}},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02116},
year = {2019}
}

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