Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families
<|reference_start|>Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families: The "massively-multilingual" training of multilingual models is known to limit their utility in any one language, and they perform particularly poorly on low-resource languages. However, there is evidence that low-resource languages can benefit from targeted multilinguality, where the model is trained on closely related languages. To test this approach more rigorously, we systematically study best practices for adapting a pre-trained model to a language family. Focusing on the Uralic family as a test case, we adapt XLM-R under various configurations to model 15 languages; we then evaluate the performance of each experimental setting on two downstream tasks and 11 evaluation languages. Our adapted models significantly outperform mono- and multilingual baselines. Furthermore, a regression analysis of hyperparameter effects reveals that adapted vocabulary size is relatively unimportant for low-resource languages, and that low-resource languages can be aggressively up-sampled during training at little detriment to performance in high-resource languages. These results introduce new best practices for performing language adaptation in a targeted setting.<|reference_end|>
@article{downey2024targeted,
    title={Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families},
    author={C.M. Downey, Terra Blevins, Dhwani Serai, Dwija Parikh, Shane
  Steinert-Threlkeld},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12413},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.12413},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}