Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families

C. M. Downey; Terra Blevins; Dhwani Serai; Dwija Parikh; Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

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arXiv · 2405.12413

Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families

C. M. Downey·Terra Blevins·Dhwani Serai·Dwija Parikh·Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

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Abstract

The "massively-multilingual" training of multilingual models is known to limit their utility in any one language, and they perform particularly poorly on low-resource languages. However, there is evidence that low-resource languages can benefit from targeted multilinguality, where the model is trained on closely related languages. To test this approach more rigorously, we systematically study best practices for adapting a pre-trained model to a language family. Focusing on the Uralic family as a test case, we adapt XLM-R under various configurations to model 15 languages; we then evaluate the performance of each experimental setting on two downstream tasks and 11 evaluation languages. Our adapted models significantly outperform mono- and multilingual baselines. Furthermore, a regression analysis of hyperparameter effects reveals that adapted vocabulary size is relatively unimportant for low-resource languages, and that low-resource languages can be aggressively up-sampled during training at little detriment to performance in high-resource languages. These results introduce new best practices for performing language adaptation in a targeted setting.

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BibTeX RIS

C. M. Downey, Terra Blevins, Dhwani Serai, Dwija Parikh, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld. 2024-05-20. Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12413

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