Model Selection for Cross-Lingual Transfer using a Learned Scoring Function

Transformers that are pre-trained on multilingual text corpora, such as, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, have achieved impressive cross-lingual transfer learning results. In the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setting, only English training data is assumed, and the fine-tuned model is evaluated on another target language. No target-language validation data is assumed in this setting, however substantial variance has been observed in target language performance between different fine-tuning runs. Prior work has relied on English validation/development data to select among models that are fine-tuned with different learning rates, number of steps and other hyperparameters, often resulting in suboptimal choices. In this paper, we show that it is possible to select consistently better models when small amounts of annotated data are available in an auxiliary pivot language. We propose a machine learning approach to model selection that uses the fine-tuned model's own internal representations to predict its cross-lingual capabilities. In extensive experiments we find that our approach consistently selects better models than English validation data across five languages and five well-studied NLP tasks, achieving results that are comparable to small amounts of target language development data.