CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration - a Step towards Cross-lingual Transfer beyond Textual Scripts

Hoang Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Ye Liu, Natalie Parde, Eugene Rohrbaugh, Philip S. Yu


Abstract
Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer for many languages by failing to consider the importance of language contact. Some languages are more well-connected than others, and target languages can benefit from transferring from closely related languages; for many languages, the set of closely related languages does not include English. In this work, we study the impact of source language for cross-lingual transfer, demonstrating the importance of selecting source languages that have high contact with the target language. We also construct a novel benchmark dataset for close contact Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese (CJKV) languages to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact. To comprehensively capture contact between these languages, we propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts via Contrastive Learning objectives, leading to enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.356
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4008–4020
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.356
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hoang Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Ye Liu, Natalie Parde, Eugene Rohrbaugh, and Philip S. Yu. 2024. CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration - a Step towards Cross-lingual Transfer beyond Textual Scripts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4008–4020, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration - a Step towards Cross-lingual Transfer beyond Textual Scripts (Nguyen et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.356.pdf