Transferring Scientific English Pre-Trained Language Models to Multiple Languages Using Cross-Lingual Transfer

Abstract

In this paper, we present a pipeline for domain-adaptive pre-training and cross-lingual transfer of scientific language models from English to non-English languages. Starting from the multilingual scientific corpus SciLaD, we construct a cleaned English pre-training split and continually pre-train a T5-base encoder–decoder model, resulting in EN-T5-Sci. Our model achieves consistent zero-shot improvements on the Global-MMLU English benchmark, outperforming its base model, with particularly strong gains in STEM and Social Sciences. Despite its moderate size, it performs comparably to the much larger BLOOM model on scientific categories. Building on EN-T5-Sci, we transfer scientific knowledge to German, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese using the WECHSEL method. Our approach reinitializes language-specific embedding layers via aligned static embeddings while retaining the pre-trained Transformer weights, yielding six monolingual scientific T5 models. In zero-shot evaluation in each respective language, the transferred models generally outperform monolingual baselines. These results demonstrate that scientific domain knowledge acquired through English pre-training can be effectively transferred across languages, enabling competitive non-English scientific language models without training large multilingual systems from scratch.

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