Challenge: Existing work shows that limited modeling capacity is a major contributor to reduced performance in multilingual models.
Approach: They investigate the isotropy of multilingual model decoder representations using intrinsic dimensionality and IsoScore to measure how they utilize the dimensions in their underlying vector space.
Outcome: The proposed model decoder representations are less isotropic and occupy fewer dimensions than bilingual models.

Similar Papers

Correlations between Multilingual Language Model Geometry and Crosslingual Transfer Performance (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pre-trained multilingual language models represent multiple languages in a single vector space, a feature hypothesized to enable impressive crosslingual transfer capabilities.
Approach: They propose to use a multilingual representation space that sorts axes based on their language-separability to determine whether geometric distances between languages correlate with crosslingual transfer performance.
Outcome: The proposed measures do not generalize well across models, layers, and tasks.
The Geometry of Multilingual Language Model Representations (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: XLM-R models encode language-sensitive information in each language, allowing them to extract features for downstream tasks and cross-lingual transfer learning.
Approach: They evaluate how multilingual language models maintain a shared multilingual representation space while still encoding language-sensitive information in each language.
Outcome: The proposed model can extract features for downstream tasks and cross-lingual transfer learning.
On the Acquisition of Shared Grammatical Representations in Bilingual Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models’ multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood.
Approach: They use structural priming to study grammatical representations in humans by controlling for training data quantity and language exposure.
Outcome: The proposed model is able to learn a language in two languages and has a higher likelihood of learning a prepositional object (PO) dative sentence than a double object (DO) .
Breaking Down Multilingual Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multilingual training is an essential ingredient in machine translation systems . but it has different effects in different multilingual settings, such as many-to-one, one-tomany and many- to-many learning .
Approach: They compare multilingual training settings with encoders and decoders initialized by multilingual learning . they find important attention heads for each language pair and compare their correlations during inference .
Outcome: The proposed models outperform the best models for high-resource languages and one-to-many models for low-resourced languages.
Representational Isomorphism and Alignment of Multilingual Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing isomorphism of sentence representations can facilitate representational alignments in zero-shot and few-shot settings.
Approach: They propose to apply a contrastive objective to LLMs with a small number of translation pairs to improve models' performance on Semantic Textual Similarity tasks.
Outcome: The proposed representation-level approach significantly improves on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks across languages even without a monolingual objective.
Multilingual Pixel Representations for Translation and Effective Cross-lingual Transfer (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent work shows that pixel representations can be finetuned across scripts without vocabulary extensions, adapters, or transliteration.
Approach: They propose to use pixel representations to train multilingual machine translation models . they explore parameter sharing within and across scripts to better understand where they lead to positive transfer .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two multilingual datasets with different language coverage compared to subword embeddings . the proposed model can be finetuned cross-lingually or to unseen scripts, and is more data-efficient than other alternatives such as vocabulary expansion .
Assessing the Impact of Typological Features on Multilingual Machine Translation in the Age of Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evidence on the intrinsic difficulty of multilingual modeling is limited to small monolingual models or bilingual models trained from scratch.
Approach: They propose to use typological properties to determine the difficulty of modeling a language . they analyze two large pre-trained multilingual translation models .
Outcome: The proposed models are based on two large pre-trained models of encoder-decoder and decoder-only machine translation.
On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: State-of-the-art unsupervised multilingual models generalize in zero-shot cross-lingual setting . generalization ability attributed to shared subword vocabulary and joint training across multiple languages .
Approach: They propose an approach that transfers a monolingual model to new languages at the lexical level.
Outcome: The proposed approach is competitive with multilingual BERT on cross-lingual classification benchmarks and on a new cross-linguistic question answering dataset.
Three Strategies to Improve One-to-Many Multilingual Translation (D18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies show that one-to-many multilingual translation cannot perform on par with the individually trained models.
Approach: They propose to exploit unique initial states for target languages and language-dependent positional embeddings to create hidden cells of the encoder to achieve comparable or even better performance than individually trained models.
Outcome: The proposed methods achieve comparable or even better performance than the individually trained models.
Ready to Translate, Not to Represent? Bias and Performance Gaps in Multilingual LLMs Across Language Families and Domains (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined Machine Translation, enabling context-aware and fluent translations across hundreds of languages and textual domains.
Approach: They propose a framework and dataset to evaluate the translation quality and fairness of open-source LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework and dataset evaluates translation quality and fairness of open-source LLMs.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations