Exploring the Relationship between Alignment and Cross-lingual Transfer in Multilingual Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | despite lack of explicit cross-lingual training data, multilingual models can achieve cross-linguistic transfer. |
| Approach: | They find alignment is significantly correlated with cross-lingual transfer . they advocate for further research on realignment methods for smaller models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms XLM-R Large in POS-tagging between English and Arabic by +15.8 accuracy. |
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Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment—A Survey (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual alignment is the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of methods to improve cross-lingual alignment . they argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be applied to encoder models and encoder-decoder-only models . they show that language-neutral and language-specific information is key . |
Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, yet their benefits remain concentrated in English and a small number of high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They fine-tuned large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluated zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. |
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Middle-Layer Representation Alignment for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Fine-Tuned LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Effective cross-lingual transfer is hindered by performance gaps and the scarcity of fine-tuning data in many languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a middle-layer alignment objective integrated into task-specific training to improve cross-lingual transfer across languages. |
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AlignFreeze: Navigating the Impact of Realignment on the Layers of Multilingual Models Across Diverse Languages (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Realignment techniques are often employed to enhance cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models, but can degrade performance in languages that differ significantly from the fine-tuned source language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that freezes either the lower half or upper half of the layers during realignment to prevent performance degradation. |
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Can Machine Translation Bridge Multilingual Pretraining and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning? (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that pretrain for cross-lingual tasks do not improve cross-linguistic learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to employ machine translation as a continued training objective to enhance language representation learning by bridging multilingual pretraining and cross-lingual applications. |
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AlignX: Advancing Multilingual Large Language Models with Multilingual Representation Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual large language models (LLMs) possess impressive multilingual understanding and generation capabilities, but performance and cross-lingual alignment often lag for non-dominant languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-level framework to enhance multilingual performance of pre-trained LLMs by integrating multilingual semantic alignment and language feature integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multilingual capability of pre-trained LLMs by bringing representations closer and improving cross-lingual alignment. |
Can you map it to English? The Role of Cross-Lingual Alignment in the Multilingual Performance of LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can answer prompts in many languages despite being pre-trained mostly on English text. |
| Approach: | They propose a Discriminative Alignment Index to quantify instance-level alignment across 24 languages other than English and three distinct NLU tasks. |
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Cross-Align: Modeling Deep Cross-lingual Interactions for Word Alignment (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word alignment models capture few interactions between input sentence pairs, which severely degrades the word alignment quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to model deep interactions between input and target sentences using a two-stage training framework to train the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four out of five language pairs. |
PreAlign: Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer by Early Establishment of Multilingual Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes multilingual alignment prior to language model pretraining and preserves this alignment using a code-switching strategy during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in a synthetic English to English-Clone setting show that PreAlign outperforms standard multilingual joint training in language modeling, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and cross-linguistic knowledge application. |
Word Alignment by Fine-tuning Embeddings on Parallel Corpora (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on word alignment has focused on unsupervised learning on parallel text. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pre-trained contextualized word embeddings with multilingually trained language models to achieve competitive results on word alignment tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on five language pairs and can train multilingual word aligners that can obtain robust performance on different language pairs. |