用音译数据提升多语言模型对齐,让不同语言表达更相似。
How Transliterations Improve Crosslingual Alignment
- 在无平行语料下,仅通过音译文本增强模型对齐能力。
- 音译使句子表示相似度整体提升,即使随机句对也更接近。
- 对比学习目标能更好区分匹配与非匹配句对,适合多语言研究者。
近期研究表明,使用原始文本和音译文本联合训练多语言预训练模型(mPLMs),可改善跨语言对齐并提升跨语言迁移性能。然而,音译为何能带来改进尚不明确,因该方法未使用任何平行语料。本文针对波兰语-乌克兰语、印地语-乌尔都语两组相关语言,在多种设置下训练模型,评估其跨语言对齐效果。基于句子表示定义四类相似性指标。实验表明,仅引入音译数据即可提升整体相似度,甚至对随机句对也有效。结合辅助音译对齐目标,尤其是对比学习目标,模型能更好区分匹配与随机句对,实现更优对齐。但结果同时显示,更好的对齐并不总带来下游任务性能提升,提示需进一步厘清对齐与性能间的关系。代码基于 exttt{https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA}。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent studies have shown that post-aligning multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) using alignment objectives on both original and transliterated data can improve crosslingual alignment. This improvement further leads to better crosslingual transfer performance. However, it remains unclear how and why a better crosslingual alignment is achieved, as this technique only involves transliterations, and does not use any parallel data. This paper attempts to explicitly evaluate the crosslingual alignment and identify the key elements in transliteration-based approaches that contribute to better performance. For this, we train multiple models under varying setups for two pairs of related languages: (1) Polish and Ukrainian and (2) Hindi and Urdu. To assess alignment, we define four types of similarities based on sentence representations. Our experimental results show that adding transliterations alone improves the overall similarities, even for random sentence pairs. With the help of auxiliary transliteration-based alignment objectives, especially the contrastive objective, the model learns to distinguish matched from random pairs, leading to better crosslingual alignment. However, we also show that better alignment does not always yield better downstream performance, suggesting that further research is needed to clarify the connection between alignment and performance. The code implementation is based on \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA}.
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