Model Size and Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Performance in XLM-R

Abstract

Abstract: Massively multilingual transformers (MMTs) pretrained via language modeling (e.g., mBERT, XLM-R) have become a default paradigm for zero-shot language transfer in NLP, offering unmatched transfer performance. Current evaluations, however, verify their efficacy in transfers (a) to languages with sufficiently large pretraining corpora, and (b) between close languages. In this work, we analyze the limitations of downstream language transfer with MMTs, showing that, much like cross-lingual word embeddings, they are substantially less effective in resource-lean scenarios and for distant languages.

Research Question

What is the impact of model size (XLM-R-base vs. XLM-R-large) on few-shot cross-lingual transfer performance when fine-tuned on intermediate multilingual tasks versus zero-shot transfer?

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