Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Hebrew NLP

Matan Eyal, Hila Noga, Roee Aharoni, Idan Szpektor, Reut Tsarfaty

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent work attributes progress in NLP to large language models (LMs) with increased model size and large quantities of pretraining data. Despite this, current state-of-the-art LMs for Hebrew are both under-parameterized and under-trained compared to LMs in other languages. Additionally, previous work on pretrained Hebrew LMs focused on encoder-only models. While the encoder-only architecture is beneficial for classification tasks, it does not cater well for sub-word prediction tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition, when considering the morphologically rich nature of Hebrew. In this paper we argue that sequence-to-sequence generative architectures are more suitable for large LMs in morphologically rich languages (MRLs) such as Hebrew. We demonstrate this by casting tasks in the Hebrew NLP pipeline as text-to-text tasks, for which we can leverage powerful multilingual, pretrained sequence-to-sequence models as mT5, eliminating the need for a separate, specialized, morpheme-based, decoder. Using this approach, our experiments show substantial improvements over previously published results on all existing Hebrew NLP benchmarks. These results suggest that multilingual sequence-to-sequence models present a promising building block for NLP for MRLs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages7700-7708
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429623
StatePublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes
Event61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 9 Jul 202314 Jul 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period9/07/2314/07/23

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Funding

We thank Dan Bareket and Eylon Guetta from Bar Ilan University for their help in sharing the UD and NEMO data.

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