Prompt Learning to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Cross-lingual Transfer for Open-domain Dialogue Generation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Dialogue systems for non-English languages have long been under-explored. In this paper, we take the first step to investigate few-shot cross-lingual transfer learning (FS-XLT) and multitask learning (MTL) in the context of open-domain dialogue generation for non-English languages with limited data. We observed catastrophic forgetting in both FS-XLT and MTL for all 6 languages in our preliminary experiments. To mitigate the issue, we propose a simple yet effective prompt learning approach that can preserve the multilinguality of multilingual pre-trained language model (mPLM) in FS-XLT and MTL by bridging the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning with Fixed-prompt LM Tuning and our hand-crafted prompts. Experimental results on all 6 languages in terms of both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/JeremyLeiLiu/XLinguDial.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 42 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 May 2023.
Builds on
42 of 51 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 2.
4 papers.
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- 2025Mixtures of SubExperts for Large Language Continual Learning9 Nov 2025
- 2025MLLM-CTBench: A Benchmark for Continual Instruction Tuning with Reasoning Process Diagnosis31 Jul 2025
- 2024Soft Language Prompts for Language Transfer2 Jul 2024
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