# DAMP: Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser for Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08054 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08054/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [Beto, Bentz, Becas: The Surprising Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09077/) (2019)
- [Explicit Inductive Bias for Transfer Learning with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01483/) (2018)
- [XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01401/) (2020)
- [Emerging Cross-lingual Structure in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01464/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Removal of Demographic Attributes from Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06640/) (2018)
- [XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07412/) (2021)
- [MTOP: A Comprehensive Multilingual Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09335/) (2020)
- [A robust self-learning method for fully unsupervised cross-lingual mappings of word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06297/) (2018)
- [Linear Adversarial Concept Erasure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12091/) (2022)
- [LinCE: A Centralized Benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04322/) (2020)
- [Low-Resource Domain Adaptation for Compositional Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03546/) (2020)
- [Don't Parse, Generate! A Sequence to Sequence Architecture for Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11458/) (2020)
- [Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13309/) (2021)
- [Explicit Alignment Objectives for Multilingual Bidirectional Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07972/) (2020)
- [Robustness Testing of Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15262/) (2020)
- [PrivacyNet: Semi-Adversarial Networks for Multi-attribute Face Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00561/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07554/) (2021)
- [Translate & Fill: Improving Zero-Shot Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04319/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Beyond Monolingual Assumptions: A Survey of Code-Switched NLP in the Era of Large Language Models across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07037/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern virtual assistants use internal semantic parsing engines to convert user utterances to actionable commands. However, prior work has demonstrated that semantic parsing is a difficult multilingual transfer task with low transfer efficiency compared to other tasks. In global markets such as India and Latin America, this is a critical issue as switching between languages is prevalent for bilingual users. In this work we dramatically improve the zero-shot performance of a multilingual and codeswitched semantic parsing system using two stages of multilingual alignment. First, we show that constrastive alignment pretraining improves both English performance and transfer efficiency. We then introduce a constrained optimization approach for hyperparameter-free adversarial alignment during finetuning. Our Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser (DAMP) improves mBERT transfer performance by 3x, 6x, and 81x on the Spanglish, Hinglish and Multilingual Task Oriented Parsing benchmarks respectively and outperforms XLM-R and mT5-Large using 3.2x fewer parameters.