When is BERT Multilingual? Isolating Crucial Ingredients for Cross-lingual Transfer

Ameet Deshpande, Partha Talukdar, Karthik Narasimhan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

While recent work on multilingual language models has demonstrated their capacity for cross-lingual zero-shot transfer, there is a lack of consensus in the community as to what shared properties between languages enable transfer on downstream tasks. Analyses involving pairs of natural languages are often inconclusive and contradictory since languages simultaneously differ in many linguistic aspects. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to isolate the effects of various linguistic properties by measuring zero-shot transfer between four diverse natural languages and their counterparts constructed by modifying aspects such as the script, word order, and syntax. Among other things, our experiments show that the absence of sub-word overlap significantly affects zero-shot transfer when languages differ in their word order, and there is a strong correlation between transfer performance and word embedding alignment between languages (e.g., ρs = 0.94 on the task of NLI). Our results call for focus in multilingual models on explicitly improving word embedding alignment between languages rather than relying on its implicit emergence.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3610-3623
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917711
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Jul 10 2022Jul 15 2022

Publication series

NameNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period7/10/227/15/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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