Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Arabic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Using Multilingual Transformer Model mT5

Due to the promising performance of pre-trained language models for task-oriented dialogue systems (DS) in English, some efforts to provide multilingual models for task-oriented DS in low-resource languages have emerged. These efforts still face a long-standing challenge due to the lack of high-quality data for these languages, especially Arabic. To circumvent the cost and time-intensive data collection and annotation, cross-lingual transfer learning can be used when few training data are available in the low-resource target language. Therefore, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning in building an end-to-end Arabic task-oriented DS using the mT5 transformer model. We use the Arabic task-oriented dialogue dataset (Arabic-TOD) in the training and testing of the model. We present the cross-lingual transfer learning deployed with three different approaches: mSeq2Seq, Cross-lingual Pre-training (CPT), and Mixed-Language Pre-training (MLT). We obtain good results for our model compared to the literature for Chinese language using the same settings. Furthermore, cross-lingual transfer learning deployed with the MLT approach outperform the other two approaches. Finally, we show that our results can be improved by increasing the training dataset size.