Investigating the Quality of Static Anchor Embeddings from Transformers for Under-Resourced Languages

This paper reports on experiments for cross-lingual transfer using the anchor-based approach of Schuster et al. (2019) for English and a low-resourced language, namely Hindi. For the sake of comparison, we also evaluate the approach on three very different higher-resourced languages, viz. Dutch, Russian and Chinese. Initially designed for ELMo embeddings, we analyze the approach for the more recent BERT family of transformers for a variety of tasks, both mono and cross-lingual. The results largely prove that like most other cross-lingual transfer approaches, the static anchor approach is underwhelming for the low-resource language, while performing adequately for the higher resourced ones. We attempt to provide insights into both the quality of the anchors, and the performance for low-shot cross-lingual transfer to better understand this performance gap. We make the extracted anchors and the modified train and test sets available for future research at https://github.com/pranaydeeps/Vyaapak