
Abstract
Recently, it has been found that monolingual English language models can be used as knowledge bases. Instead of structural knowledge base queries, masked sentences such as “Paris is the capital of [MASK]” are used as probes. We translate the established benchmarks TREx and GoogleRE into 53 languages. Working with mBERT, we investigate three questions. (i) Can mBERT be used as a multilingual knowledge base? Most prior work only considers English. Extending research to multiple languages is important for diversity and accessibility. (ii) Is mBERT’s performance as knowledge base language-independent or does it vary from language to language? (iii) A multilingual model is trained on more text, e.g., mBERT is trained on 104 Wikipedias. Can mBERT leverage this for better performance? We find that using mBERT as a knowledge base yields varying performance across languages and pooling predictions across languages improves performance. Conversely, mBERT exhibits a language bias; e.g., when queried in Italian, it tends to predict Italy as the country of origin.
Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: | 740516 |
EU Projects: | Horizon 2020 > ERC Grants > ERC Advanced Grant > ERC Grant 740516: NonSequeToR - Non-sequence models for tokenization replacement |
Research Centers: | Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) |
Subjects: | 000 Computer science, information and general works > 000 Computer science, knowledge, and systems 400 Language > 400 Language 400 Language > 410 Linguistics |
URN: | urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-92190-1 |
Place of Publication: | Stroudsburg, PA |
Language: | English |
Item ID: | 92190 |
Date Deposited: | 27. May 2022, 08:46 |
Last Modified: | 27. May 2022, 08:46 |