When is BERT Multilingual? Isolating Crucial Ingredients for Cross-lingual Transfer. (arXiv:2110.14782v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Web: http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14782

While recent work on multilingual language models has demonstrated their
capacity for cross-lingual zero-shot transfer on downstream tasks, there is a
lack of consensus in the community as to what shared properties between
languages enable such transfer. Analyses involving pairs of natural languages
are often inconclusive and contradictory since languages simultaneously differ
in many linguistic aspects. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical
study to isolate the effects of various linguistic properties by measuring
zero-shot transfer between four diverse …

arxiv bert cross cross-lingual transfer