Combining Automated and Manual Data for Effective Downstream Fine-Tuning of Transformers for Low-Resource Language Applications

AbstractThis paper addresses the constraints of down-stream applications of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for low-resource languages. These constraints are pre-train data deficiency preventing a low-resource language from being well represented in a PLM and inaccessibility of high-quality task-specific data annotation that limits task learning. We propose to use automatically labeled texts combined with manually annotated data in a two-stage task fine-tuning approach. The experiments revealed that utilizing such methodology combined with vocabulary adaptation may compensate for the absence of a targeted PLM or the deficiency of manually annotated data. The methodology is validated on the morphological tagging task for the Udmurt language. We publish our best model that achieved 93.25% token accuracy on HuggingFace Hub along with the training code1.