Instruction Tuning versus English Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer on Non-Latin Script Languages

Abstract

Abstract: Instruction tuning has emerged as a powerful technique, significantly boosting zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. While recent work has explored cross-lingual generalization by applying instruction tuning to multilingual models, previous studies have primarily focused on English, with a limited exploration of non-English tasks. For an in-depth exploration of cross-lingual generalization in instruction tuning, we perform instruction tuning individually for two distinct language meta-datasets. Subsequently, we assess the performance on unseen tasks in a language different from the one used f

Research Question

Does instruction tuning on multimodal datasets outperform English intermediate-task training for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on XTREME classification tasks when evaluated on non-Latin script languages?

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