One Step Is Enough for Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer: Co-Training with Gradient Optimization

Anonymous

Abstract: The current state-of-the-art for few-shot cross-lingual transfer learning first trains on abundant labeled data in the source language and then fine-tunes with a few examples on the target language, termed target-adapting. Though this has been demonstrated to work on a variety of tasks, in this paper we show some deficiencies of this approach and propose a one-step co-training method that trains on both source and target data with stochastic gradient surgery, a novel gradient-level optimization. Unlike the previous studies that focus on one language at a time when target-adapting, we use one model to handle all target languages simultaneously to avoid excessively language-specific models. Moreover, we discuss the unreality of utilizing large target development sets for model selection in previous literature, and further show that our method is development-free for target languages and also able to escape from overfitting issues. We conduct a large-scale experiment on 4 diverse NLP tasks across up to 48 languages. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tasks and outperforms target-adapting by a large margin, especially for languages that are linguistically distant from the source language, e.g., an average of 7.36% absolute F1 improvement on the NER task, up to a gain of 17.60% on Punjabi.

Paper Type: long