Make the Best of Cross-lingual Transfer: Evidence from POS Tagging with over 100 Languages

Abstract

Cross-lingual transfer learning with large multilingual pre-trained models can be an effective approach for low-resource languages with no labeled training data. Existing evaluations of cross-lingual generalisability of large pre-trained models use datasets with English training data, and test data in a selection of target languages. We explore a more extensive transfer learning setup with 65 different source languages and 105 target languages for part-of-speech tagging. Through our analysis, we show that pre-training of both source and target language, as well as matching language families, writing systems, word order systems, and lexical-phonetic distance significantly impact cross-lingual performance.

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Reproductions