Abstract: Pre-trained models have demonstrated their effectiveness in many downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The availability of multilingual pre-trained models enables zero-shot transfer of NLP tasks from high resource languages to low resource ones. However, recent research in improving pre-trained models focuses heavily on English. While it is possible to train the latest neural architectures for other languages from scratch, it is undesirable due to the required amount of compute. In this work, we tackle the problem of transferring an existing pre-trained model from English to other languages under a limited computational budget. With a single GPU, our approach can obtain a foreign BERT base model within a day and a foreign BERT large within two days. Furthermore, evaluating our models on six languages, we demonstrate that our models are better than multilingual BERT on two zero-shot tasks: natural language inference and dependency parsing.

Introduction: Pre-trained models BIBREF0, BIBREF1 have received much of attention recently thanks to their impressive results in many down stream NLP tasks. Additionally, multilingual pre-trained models enable many NLP applications for other languages via zero-short cross-lingual transfer. Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer has shown promising results for rapidly building applications for low resource languages. BIBREF2 show the potential of multilingual-BERT BIBREF0 in zero-shot transfer for a large number of languages from different language families on five NLP tasks, namely, natural language inference, document classification, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and dependency parsing. Although multilingual models are an important ingredient for enhancing language technology in many languages, recent research on improving pre-trained models puts much emphasis on English BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5. The current state of affairs makes it difficult to translate advancements in pre-training from English to non-English languages. To our best knowledge, there are only three available multilingual pre-trained models to date: (1) the multilingual-BERT (mBERT) that supports 104 languages, (2) cross-lingual language model BIBREF6 that supports 100 languages, and (3) Language Agnostic SEntence Representations BIBREF7 that supports 93 languages. Among the three models, LASER is based on neural machine translation approach and strictly requires parallel data to train. Do multilingual models always need to be trained from scratch? Can we transfer linguistic knowledge learned by English pre-trained models to other languages? In this work, we develop a technique to rapidly transfer an existing pre-trained model from English to other languages in an energy efficient way BIBREF8. As the first step, we focus on building a bilingual language model (LM) of English and a target language. Starting from a pre-trained English LM, we learn the target language specific parameters (i.e., word embeddings), while keeping the encoder layers of the pre-trained English LM fixed. We then fine-tune both English and target model to obtain the bilingual LM. We apply our approach to autoencoding language models with masked language model objective and show the advantage of the proposed approach in zero-shot transfer. Our main contributions in this work are: We propose a fast adaptation method for obtaining a bilingual BERT$_{\textsc {base}}$ of English and a target language within a day using one Tesla V100 16GB GPU. We evaluate our bilingual LMs for six languages on two zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks, namely natural language inference BIBREF9 and universal dependency parsing. We show that our models offer competitive performance or even better that mBERT. We illustrate that our bilingual LMs can serve as an excellent feature extractor in supervised dependency parsing task.

Question: How is the model transferred to other languages?
Answer: Build a bilingual language model,   learn the target language specific parameters starting from a pretrained English LM , fine-tune both English and target model to obtain the bilingual LM.