Polyglot Prompt: Multilingual Multitask PrompTraining

This paper aims for a potential architectural breakthrough for multilingual learning and asks: could different tasks from different languages be modeled in a monolithic framework (without any task/language-specific module)? The benefit of achieving this is not only that systems trained on low resources scenario can be assisted by more other languages and tasks, but opening new doors for future multilingual research. We approach this goal by developing a learning framework Polyglot Prompt, where prompting methods are introduced to learn a unified semantic space for different languages and tasks after proper multilingual prompt engineering. Experimentally, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on 6 tasks (topic classification, sentiment classification, named entity recognition, question answering, natural language inference, summarization), 24 datasets, and 49 languages, which shows the efficacy of multilingual multitask prompting training and suggests several interesting observations. e.g., English prompts are polyglots since directly applying them to task samples in other languages could result in a better improvement. We also present an interpretable multilingual evaluation methodology and show how the proposed framework, multilingual multitask prompt training, works. We release all datasets prompted in the best setting and will release our code soon.