Multilingual and Zero-Shot is Closing in on Monolingual Web Register Classification




Rönnqvist Samuel, Skantsi Valtteri, Oinonen Miika, Laippala Veronika

Simon Dobnik, Lilja Øvrelid

Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics

2021

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings

Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings

178

157

165

978-91-7929-614-8

1650-3686

https://ep.liu.se/en/conference-article.aspx?series=ecp&issue=178&Article_No=16

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/56911747



This article studies register classification of documents from the unrestricted web, such as news articles or opinion blogs, in a multilingual setting, exploring both the benefit of training on multiple languages and the capabilities for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. While the wide range of linguistic variation found on the web poses challenges for register classification, recent studies have shown that good levels of cross-lingual transfer from the extensive English CORE corpus to other languages can be achieved. In this study, we show that training on multiple languages 1) benefits languages with limited amounts of register-annotated data, 2) on average achieves performance on par with monolingual models, and 3) greatly improves upon previous zero-shot results in Finnish, French and Swedish. The best results are achieved with the multilingual XLM-R model. As data, we use the CORE corpus series featuring register annotated data from the unrestricted web.


Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 21:46