Exploring Geometric Representational Disparities between Multilingual and Bilingual Translation Models

Neha Verma, Kenton Murray, Kevin Duh


Abstract
Multilingual machine translation has proven immensely useful for both parameter efficiency and overall performance across many language pairs via complete multilingual parameter sharing. However, some language pairs in multilingual models can see worse performance than in bilingual models, especially in the one-to-many translation setting. Motivated by their empirical differences, we examine the geometric differences in representations from bilingual models versus those from one-to-many multilingual models. Specifically, we compute the isotropy of these representations using intrinsic dimensionality and IsoScore, in order to measure how the representations utilize the dimensions in their underlying vector space. Using the same evaluation data in both models, we find that for a given language pair, its multilingual model decoder representations are consistently less isotropic and occupy fewer dimensions than comparable bilingual model decoder representations. Additionally, we show that much of the anisotropy in multilingual decoder representations can be attributed to modeling language-specific information, therefore limiting remaining representational capacity.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.604
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6909–6921
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.604
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neha Verma, Kenton Murray, and Kevin Duh. 2024. Exploring Geometric Representational Disparities between Multilingual and Bilingual Translation Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6909–6921, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Geometric Representational Disparities between Multilingual and Bilingual Translation Models (Verma et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.604.pdf