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Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning

arXiv 2004.04721 ↗First posted 9 Apr 2020cs.CL cs.LGcited by 95

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Abstract (arXiv)

Both human and machine translation play a central role in cross-lingual transfer learning: many multilingual datasets have been created through professional translation services, and using machine translation to translate either the test set or the training set is a widely used transfer technique. In this paper, we show that such translation process can introduce subtle artifacts that have a notable impact in existing cross-lingual models. For instance, in natural language inference, translating the premise and the hypothesis independently can reduce the lexical overlap between them, which current models are highly sensitive to. We show that some previous findings in cross-lingual transfer learning need to be reconsidered in the light of this phenomenon. Based on the gained insights, we also improve the state-of-the-art in XNLI for the translate-test and zero-shot approaches by 4.3 and 2.8 points, respectively.

Key facts. Cited by 95 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 9; 2022: 17; 2023: 22; 2024: 17; 2025: 16; 2026: 14.

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  1. 2021Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Modelscited by 278
  2. 2023Do Multilingual Language Models Think Better in English?cited by 87
  3. 2023Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Multilingual Summarisationcited by 48
  4. 2024Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basquecited by 42
  5. 2023Revisiting Machine Translation for Cross-lingual Classificationcited by 40
  6. 2023Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysiscited by 34
  7. 2022What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needscited by 27
  8. 2022QAmeleon: Multilingual QA with Only 5 Examplescited by 25
  9. 2022Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resourcescited by 25
  10. 2022Cross-Lingual Dialogue Dataset Creation via Outline-Based Generationcited by 23
  11. 2024BertaQA: How Much Do Language Models Know About Local Culture?cited by 23
  12. 2023Why Does Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation Fail? An Explanation and a Solutioncited by 22
38 more
  1. 2021Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Semantic Parsingcited by 19
  2. 2023A Material Lens on Coloniality in NLPcited by 19
  3. 2021Crossing the Conversational Chasm: A Primer on Natural Language Processing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 16
  4. 2021Modelling Latent Translations for Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 16
  5. 2023Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systemscited by 16
  6. 2021Reinforced Iterative Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognitioncited by 15
  7. 2022Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarizationcited by 14
  8. 2026Tiny Aya: Bridging Scale and Multilingual Depthcited by 14
  9. 2022JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Datasetcited by 11
  10. 2023Tik-to-Tok: Translating Language Models One Token at a Time: An Embedding Initialization Strategy for Efficient Language Adaptationcited by 11
  11. 2025Can you map it to English? The Role of Cross-Lingual Alignment in Multilingual Performance of LLMscited by 11
  12. 2025Analyzing the Effect of Linguistic Similarity on Cross-Lingual Transfer: Tasks and Experimental Setups Mattercited by 10
  13. 2021A Dataset and Baselines for Multilingual Reply Suggestioncited by 9
  14. 2021Compositional Generalization in Multilingual Semantic Parsing over Wikidatacited by 9
  15. 2024Translation Errors Significantly Impact Low-Resource Languages in Cross-Lingual Learningcited by 9
  16. 2023Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Redditcited by 8
  17. 2023How Good are Commercial Large Language Models on African Languages?cited by 8
  18. 2025Metaphor and Large Language Models: When Surface Features Matter More than Deep Understandingcited by 8
  19. 2021A cost-benefit analysis of cross-lingual transfer methodscited by 7
  20. 2023To Translate or Not to Translate: A Systematic Investigation of Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Transfer to Low-Resource Languagescited by 7
  21. 2024Basque and Spanish Counter Narrative Generation: Data Creation and Evaluationcited by 7
  22. 2024The Power of Question Translation Training in Multilingual Reasoning: Broadened Scope and Deepened Insightscited by 7
  23. 2022Evaluation Benchmarks for Spanish Sentence Representationscited by 6
  24. 2022Synergy with Translation Artifacts for Training and Inference in Multilingual Taskscited by 6
  25. 2023On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasetscited by 6
  26. 2023Explanatory Argument Extraction of Correct Answers in Resident Medical Examscited by 6
  27. 2022Principled Paraphrase Generation with Parallel Corporacited by 5
  28. 2022Explaining Translationese: why are Neural Classifiers Better and what do they Learn?cited by 5
  29. 2023Measuring Spurious Correlation in Classification: 'Clever Hans' in Translationesecited by 5
  30. 2023Translating away Translationese without Parallel Datacited by 5
  31. 2024PORTULAN ExtraGLUE Datasets and Models: Kick-starting a Benchmark for the Neural Processing of Portuguesecited by 5
  32. 2024Meta4XNLI: A Crosslingual Parallel Corpus for Metaphor Detection and Interpretationcited by 5
  33. 2024M2QA: Multi-domain Multilingual Question Answeringcited by 5
  34. 2025Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models under Continued Pretraining for Language Adaptationcited by 5
  35. 2023Boosting Zero-shot Cross-lingual Retrieval by Training on Artificially Code-Switched Datacited by 4
  36. 2024Is It Good Data for Multilingual Instruction Tuning or Just Bad Multilingual Evaluation for Large Language Models?cited by 4
  37. 2025Translate, then Detect: Leveraging Machine Translation for Cross-Lingual Toxicity Classificationcited by 4
  38. 2025Multilingual Dialogue Generation and Localization with Dialogue Act Scriptingcited by 4

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