Cross-lingual Transfer Performance in Low-Resource Languages via Intermediate-Task Training

Intermediate-task training---fine-tuning a pretrained model on an intermediate task before fine-tuning again on the target task---often improves model performance substantially on language understanding tasks in monolingual English settings. We investigate whether English intermediate-task training is still helpful on non-English target tasks. Using nine intermediate language-understanding tasks, we evaluate intermediate-task transfer in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting on the XTREME benchmark. We see large improvements from intermediate training on the BUCC and Tatoeba sentence retrieval tas Research goal: What is the impact of intermediate-task training in typologically diverse low-resource languages (e.g., Swahili, Finnish) on downstream zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance, as measured by accuracy on XTREME-R tasks compared to English-intermediate training? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.2/10. This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 9.2/10.