Efficient Method for Studying Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Language Models

The capacity and effectiveness of pre-trained multilingual models (MLMs) for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is well established, but the phenomena of positive or negative transfer and the effect of language choice still need to be fully understood, especially in the complex setting of massively multilingual LMs. This work proposes an efficient method to study transfer language influence in zero-shot performance on another target language.