arXiv Computation and Language By Zhihong Huang, Yao Lu, Derek F. Wong, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang

How to Use Parallel Data for Multilingual Pretraining

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The paper explores how to leverage parallel corpora for multilingual pretraining by concatenating each document with its translation in the same training sequence, a method called Parallel Pretraining (PPT). Compared to standard pretraining (SPT), PPT alone does not consistently improve language understanding, but it builds a stronger cross‑lingual foundation. A two‑stage approach—first PPT to establish cross‑lingual knowledge, then SPT to fine‑tune for standard language modeling—consistently outperforms standard pretraining in both high‑resource and low‑resource settings.

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