Cross-Lingual Representation Alignment Through Contrastive Image-Caption Tuning

Multilingual alignment of sentence representations has mostly required bitexts to bridge the gap between languages. We investigate whether visual information can bridge this gap instead. Image caption datasets are very easy to create without requiring multilingual expertise, so this offers a more efficient alternative for low-resource languages. We find that multilingual image-caption alignment can implicitly align the text representations between languages, languages unseen by the encoder in pretraining can be incorporated into this alignment post-hoc, and these aligned representations are usable for cross-lingual Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and bitext retrieval.

Revisiting the Effects of Leakage on Dependency Parsing

Recent work by S{\o}gaard (2020) showed that, treebank size aside, overlap between training and test graphs (termed leakage) explains more of the observed variation in dependency parsing performance than other explanations. In this work we revisit this claim, testing it on more models and languages. We find that it only holds for zero-shot cross-lingual settings. We then propose a more fine-grained measure of such leakage which, unlike the original measure, not only explains but also correlates with observed performance variation. Code and data are available here: https://github.com/miriamwanner/reu-nlp-project