Expanding Pretrained Models to Thousands More Languages via Lexicon-based Adaptation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that the performance of multilingual pretrained models is highly dependent on the availability of monolingual or parallel text in a target language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use bilingual lexicons to synthesize textual or labeled data and combine it with monolingual or parallel text when available. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance for 19 under-represented languages with and without extra monolingual text. |
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| Challenge: | a large number of pretraining corpora are not publicly available, and it is unclear how much foreign language data exists in monolingual models. |
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| Challenge: | Pretrained multilingual contextual representations have shown great success, but their benefits do not apply equally to all language varieties. |
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| Challenge: | Massively multilingual language models offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks, but there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages. |
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Phylogeny-Inspired Adaptation of Multilingual Models to New Languages (2022.aacl-main)
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Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained multilingual models enable zero-shot learning even for unseen languages . current multilingual model covers only a small subset of the world's languages - due to data sparsity, they are not likely to obtain good results for many lowresource languages. |
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A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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David Adelani, Jesujoba Alabi, Angela Fan, Julia Kreutzer, Xiaoyu Shen, Machel Reid, Dana Ruiter, Dietrich Klakow, Peter Nabende, Ernie Chang, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Freshia Sackey, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris Emezue, Colin Leong, Michael Beukman, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Guyo Jarso, Oreen Yousuf, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Gilles Hacheme, Eric Peter Wairagala, Muhammad Umair Nasir, Benjamin Ajibade, Tunde Ajayi, Yvonne Gitau, Jade Abbott, Mohamed Ahmed, Millicent Ochieng, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Valencia Wagner, Idris Abdulmumin, Ayodele Awokoya, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Sibanda, Andiswa Bukula, Sam Manthalu
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Improving the Lexical Ability of Pretrained Language Models for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) use cross-lingual pretraining to align the lexical- and high-level representations of two languages. |
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