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Massively multilingual transformers pretrained with language modeling objectives (e.g., mBERT, XLM-R) have become a de facto default transfer paradigm for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in NLP, offering unmatched transfer performance. Current downstream evaluations, however, verify their efficacy predominantly in transfer settings involving languages with sufficient amounts of pretraining data, and with lexically and typologically close languages. In this work, we analyze their limitations and show that cross-lingual transfer via massively multilingual transformers, much like transfer via cross-lingual word embeddings, is substantially less effective in resource-lean scenarios and for distant languages. Our experiments, encompassing three lower-level tasks (POS tagging, dependency parsing, NER), as well as two high-level semantic tasks (NLI, QA), empirically correlate transfer performance with linguistic similarity between the source and target languages, but also with the size of pretraining corpora of target languages. We also demonstrate a surprising effectiveness of inexpensive few-shot transfer (i.e., fine-tuning on a few target-language instances after fine-tuning in the source) across the board. This suggests that additional research efforts should be invested to reach beyond the limiting zero-shot conditions.
Previous works mainly focus on improving cross-lingual transfer for NLU tasks with multilingual pretrained encoder (MPE), or improving the translation performance on NMT task with BERT. However, how to improve the cross-lingual transfer of NMT model
Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual applications, as most languag
Transferring representations from large supervised tasks to downstream tasks has shown promising results in AI fields such as Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP). In parallel, the recent progress in Machine Translation (MT) has enab
Cross-language entity linking grounds mentions in multiple languages to a single-language knowledge base. We propose a neural ranking architecture for this task that uses multilingual BERT representations of the mention and the context in a neural ne
Despite their success, large pre-trained multilingual models have not completely alleviated the need for labeled data, which is cumbersome to collect for all target languages. Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is emerging as a practical solution: pre-