Challenge: Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable cross-lingual capability of pre-trained language models . however, semantic alignments may be the reason behind such capability but remain under-explored.
Approach: They propose token-level and semantic-level code-switched masked language modeling to improve cross-lingual interactions over mono-mPLMs without parallel sentences.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms mono-mPLMs on natural language understanding and unsupervised machine translation tasks.

Similar Papers

Emerging Cross-lingual Structure in Pretrained Language Models (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Recent work has shown that multilingual pretraining works, but is unable to measure these effects.
Approach: They propose to use multilingual masked language modeling to train a model on concatenated text from multiple languages to find universal latent symmetries in embedding spaces.
Outcome: The proposed models can be trained on concatenated text from multiple languages without shared vocabulary or domain similarity.
Breaking the Script Barrier in Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models with Transliteration-Based Post-Training Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent mPLMs have shown impressive performance on crosslingual transfer tasks . however, the performance is often hindered when a lowresource target language is written in a different script than the high-resource source language.
Approach: They propose a transliteration-based method to improve cross-lingual alignment between languages using diverse scripts.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the original model on Englishcentric transfer tasks up to 50%.
On-the-fly Cross-lingual Masking for Multilingual Pre-training (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: In multilingual pre-training, multilingual models only learn cross-linguality implicitly from isomorphic spaces formed by overlapping different language spaces due to the lack of explicit cross-linguistic forward pass.
Approach: They propose a dynamic token-wise masking scheme for multilingual pre-training that uses a special token [C]x to replace a random token in the input sentence.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the performance of UNMT models on De, Ro, Ne En.
Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that denoising word alignment improves cross-lingual transferability . most applications and resources are still English-centric, making non-English users hard to access.
Approach: They propose to denoise word alignment as a cross-lingual pre-training task . they first self-label word alignments for parallel sentences and then mask tokens .
Outcome: The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability on token-level tasks, especially on question answering, and structured prediction.
Cross-lingual Visual Pre-training for Multimodal Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models have been shown to improve performance in many natural language tasks.
Approach: They propose to combine cross-lingual and visual pre-training to learn visually-grounded cross-linguistic representations using masked region classification and three-way parallel vision & language corpora.
Outcome: The proposed models obtain state-of-the-art performance when fine-tuned for multimodal machine translation.
Language Directions in Multilingual LLMs: A Layer-wise Diagnostic Study of Token Alignment and Pretraining Imprint (2026.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Using a unified probing framework, we analyze six multilingual LLMs across five languages.
Approach: They analyze multilingual representations across five languages and analyze their behavior . they find that accuracy rises by +73.5 to +80.7 points from L0 to L1 on average .
Outcome: The proposed framework enables a consistent and substantial early jump in accuracy across models . the token–language alignment measures where vocabulary sharing peaks .
Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that multilingual generative models exhibit a strong language bias toward high-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a cross-lingual alignment framework exploiting pairs of translation sentences to improve cross-linguistic abilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves cross-lingual abilities and mitigates performance gap.
mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Recent multilingual pretrained language models encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining.
Approach: They propose a language similarity measure that induces similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora.
Outcome: The proposed measure exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, and more accurate similarity results on low correlation languages.
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.
ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corpora (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for pretraining cross-lingual models are limited in their size due to the limited amount of parallel corpora.
Approach: They propose a method that encourages the model to align multiple languages with monolingual corpora to overcome the constraint of the parallel corpus size.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing cross-lingual models and delivers new state-of-the-art results in various cross-linguistic downstream tasks.

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