@inproceedings{shah-etal-2024-correlations-multilingual,
title = "Correlations between Multilingual Language Model Geometry and Crosslingual Transfer Performance",
author = "Shah, Cheril and
Chandak, Yashashree and
Mane, Atharv Mahesh and
Bergen, Benjamin and
Chang, Tyler A.",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.361",
pages = "4059--4066",
abstract = "A common approach to interpreting multilingual language models is to evaluate their internal representations. For example, studies have found that languages occupy distinct subspaces in the models{'} representation spaces, and geometric distances between languages often reflect linguistic properties such as language families and typological features. In our work, we investigate whether geometric distances between language representations correlate with zero-shot crosslingual transfer performance for POS-tagging and NER in three multilingual language models. We consider four distance metrics, including new metrics that identify a basis for a multilingual representation space that sorts axes based on their language-separability. We find that each distance metric either only moderately correlates or does not correlate with crosslingual transfer performance, and metrics do not generalize well across models, layers, and tasks. Although pairwise language separability is a reasonable predictor of crosslingual transfer, representational geometry overall is an inconsistent predictor for the crosslingual performance of multilingual language models.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="shah-etal-2024-correlations-multilingual">
<titleInfo>
<title>Correlations between Multilingual Language Model Geometry and Crosslingual Transfer Performance</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Cheril</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Shah</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yashashree</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chandak</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Atharv</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Mahesh</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mane</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Benjamin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bergen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tyler</namePart>
<namePart type="given">A</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2024-05</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nicoletta</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Calzolari</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Min-Yen</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Kan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Veronique</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Hoste</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Alessandro</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lenci</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sakriani</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Sakti</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nianwen</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xue</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>ELRA and ICCL</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Torino, Italia</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>A common approach to interpreting multilingual language models is to evaluate their internal representations. For example, studies have found that languages occupy distinct subspaces in the models’ representation spaces, and geometric distances between languages often reflect linguistic properties such as language families and typological features. In our work, we investigate whether geometric distances between language representations correlate with zero-shot crosslingual transfer performance for POS-tagging and NER in three multilingual language models. We consider four distance metrics, including new metrics that identify a basis for a multilingual representation space that sorts axes based on their language-separability. We find that each distance metric either only moderately correlates or does not correlate with crosslingual transfer performance, and metrics do not generalize well across models, layers, and tasks. Although pairwise language separability is a reasonable predictor of crosslingual transfer, representational geometry overall is an inconsistent predictor for the crosslingual performance of multilingual language models.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">shah-etal-2024-correlations-multilingual</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.361</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2024-05</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>4059</start>
<end>4066</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Correlations between Multilingual Language Model Geometry and Crosslingual Transfer Performance
%A Shah, Cheril
%A Chandak, Yashashree
%A Mane, Atharv Mahesh
%A Bergen, Benjamin
%A Chang, Tyler A.
%Y Calzolari, Nicoletta
%Y Kan, Min-Yen
%Y Hoste, Veronique
%Y Lenci, Alessandro
%Y Sakti, Sakriani
%Y Xue, Nianwen
%S Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
%D 2024
%8 May
%I ELRA and ICCL
%C Torino, Italia
%F shah-etal-2024-correlations-multilingual
%X A common approach to interpreting multilingual language models is to evaluate their internal representations. For example, studies have found that languages occupy distinct subspaces in the models’ representation spaces, and geometric distances between languages often reflect linguistic properties such as language families and typological features. In our work, we investigate whether geometric distances between language representations correlate with zero-shot crosslingual transfer performance for POS-tagging and NER in three multilingual language models. We consider four distance metrics, including new metrics that identify a basis for a multilingual representation space that sorts axes based on their language-separability. We find that each distance metric either only moderately correlates or does not correlate with crosslingual transfer performance, and metrics do not generalize well across models, layers, and tasks. Although pairwise language separability is a reasonable predictor of crosslingual transfer, representational geometry overall is an inconsistent predictor for the crosslingual performance of multilingual language models.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.361
%P 4059-4066
Markdown (Informal)
[Correlations between Multilingual Language Model Geometry and Crosslingual Transfer Performance](https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.361) (Shah et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
ACL