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MultiFiT: Efficient Multi-Lingual Language Model Fine-Tuning (arxiv.org)
3 points by sel1 on Sep 13, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A training recipe lets people fine-tune a language model cheaply in their own language, even with little text to learn from. On two cross-lingual text-classification tests, it beat models trained on orders of magnitude more data and computing power.

Abstract · MultiFiT: Efficient Multi-lingual Language Model Fine-tuning

Pretrained language models are promising particularly for low-resource languages as they only require unlabelled data. However, training existing models requires huge amounts of compute, while pretrained cross-lingual models often underperform on low-resource languages. We propose Multi-lingual language model Fine-Tuning (MultiFiT) to enable practitioners to train and fine-tune language models efficiently in their own language. In addition, we propose a zero-shot method using an existing pretrained cross-lingual model. We evaluate our methods on two widely used cross-lingual classification datasets where they outperform models pretrained on orders of magnitude more data and compute. We release all models and code.

Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Sebastian Ruder, Piotr Czapla, Marcin Kardas, Sylvain Gugger, Jeremy Howard
arXiv:1909.04761 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Sep 10, 2019 · updated Jun 3, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Proceedings of EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019

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