Exploring Alignment in Shared Cross-lingual Spaces

Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Majd Hawasly, Ahmed Abdelali


Abstract
Despite their remarkable ability to capture linguistic nuances across diverse languages, questions persist regarding the degree of alignment between languages in multilingual embeddings. Drawing inspiration from research on high-dimensional representations in neural language models, we employ clustering to uncover latent concepts within multilingual models. Our analysis focuses on quantifying the alignment and overlap of these concepts across various languages within the latent space. To this end, we introduce two metrics CALIGN and COLAP aimed at quantifying these aspects, enabling a deeper exploration of multilingual embeddings. Our study encompasses three multilingual models (mT5, mBERT, and XLM-R) and three downstream tasks (Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis). Key findings from our analysis include: i) deeper layers in the network demonstrate increased cross-lingual alignment due to the presence of language-agnostic concepts, ii) fine-tuning of the models enhances alignment within the latent space, and iii) such task-specific calibration helps in explaining the emergence of zero-shot capabilities in the models.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.344
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6326–6348
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.344
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.344
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Majd Hawasly, and Ahmed Abdelali. 2024. Exploring Alignment in Shared Cross-lingual Spaces. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6326–6348, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Alignment in Shared Cross-lingual Spaces (Mousi et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.344.pdf