# Zero-shot Reading Comprehension by Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Multi-lingual Language Representation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.09587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [When is BERT Multilingual? Isolating Crucial Ingredients for Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14782/) (2021)
- [Out of Thin Air: Is Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Keyword Detection Better Than Unsupervised?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06650/) (2022)
- [Por Qu'e N~ao Utiliser Alla Spraak? Mixed Training with Gradient Optimization in Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13869/) (2022)
- [Learning Disentangled Semantic Representations for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00996/) (2022)
- [ALIGN-MLM: Word Embedding Alignment is Crucial for Multilingual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08547/) (2022)
- [On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11420/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing through Contextual Embedding Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02212/) (2021)
- [The Impact of Cross-Lingual Adjustment of Contextual Word Representations on Zero-Shot Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06457/) (2022)
- [The Effectiveness of Intermediate-Task Training for Code-Switched Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09931/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension via Inter-sentence Dependency Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00503/) (2021)
- [Analysing Cross-Lingual Transfer in Low-Resourced African Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05311/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Clickbait Spoiling for Indonesian via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08085/) (2023)
- [Improving Cross-Lingual Reading Comprehension with Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03627/) (2021)
- [Promoting Generalized Cross-lingual Question Answering in Few-resource Scenarios via Self-knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17134/) (2023)
- [Incorporating Lexical and Syntactic Knowledge for Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16627/) (2024)
- [Evaluating and explaining training strategies for zero-shot cross-lingual news sentiment analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20054/) (2024)
- [An Understanding-Oriented Robust Machine Reading Comprehension Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00187/) (2022)
- [ThaiCoref: Thai Coreference Resolution Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06000/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Because it is not feasible to collect training data for every language, there is a growing interest in cross-lingual transfer learning. In this paper, we systematically explore zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning on reading comprehension tasks with a language representation model pre-trained on multi-lingual corpus. The experimental results show that with pre-trained language representation zero-shot learning is feasible, and translating the source data into the target language is not necessary and even degrades the performance. We further explore what does the model learn in zero-shot setting.