Multilingual Contextual Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Retrieval Performance

Abstract

Abstract: Multilingual contextual embeddings have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning, where multilingual BERT is fine-tuned on one source language and evaluated on a different target language. However, published results for mBERT zero-shot accuracy vary as much as 17 points on the MLDoc classification task across four papers. We show that the standard practice of using English dev accuracy for model selection in the zero-shot setting makes it difficult to obtain reproducible results on the MLDoc and XNLI tasks. English dev accuracy is often uncorrelate

Research Question

To what extent does the use of multilingual contextual embeddings (e.g., mBERT, XLM-R) enhance the reasoning capabilities of zero-shot cross-lingual retrieval models on XNLI, as measured by accuracy and F1 scores across high-resource and low-resource language pairs?

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