X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering

Meryem M’hamdi, Doo Soon Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May


Abstract
Multilingual models, such as M-BERT and XLM-R, have gained increasing popularity, due to their zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities. However, their generalization ability is still inconsistent for typologically diverse languages and across different benchmarks. Recently, meta-learning has garnered attention as a promising technique for enhancing transfer learning under low-resource scenarios: particularly for cross-lingual transfer in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). In this work, we propose X-METRA-ADA, a cross-lingual MEta-TRAnsfer learning ADAptation approach for NLU. Our approach adapts MAML, an optimization-based meta-learning approach, to learn to adapt to new languages. We extensively evaluate our framework on two challenging cross-lingual NLU tasks: multilingual task-oriented dialog and typologically diverse question answering. We show that our approach outperforms naive fine-tuning, reaching competitive performance on both tasks for most languages. Our analysis reveals that X-METRA-ADA can leverage limited data for faster adaptation.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.283
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3617–3632
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.283
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.283
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meryem M’hamdi, Doo Soon Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Xiang Ren, and Jonathan May. 2021. X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3617–3632, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering (M’hamdi et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.283.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.283.mp4
Code
 meryemmhamdi1/meta_cross_nlu_qa
Data
MLQATyDiQATyDiQA-GoldPXNLI