English Intermediate-Task Training Improves Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Too

Understand

Intermediate-task training---fine-tuning a pretrained model on an intermediate task before fine-tuning again on the target task---often improves model performance substantially on language understanding tasks in monolingual English settings.

• We investigate whether English intermediate-task training is still helpful on non-English target tasks.
• Using nine intermediate language-understanding tasks, we evaluate intermediate-task transfer in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting on the XTREME benchmark.
• We see large improvements from intermediate training on the BUCC and Tatoeba sentence retrieval tasks and moderate improvements on question-answering target tasks.