mOthello: When Do Cross-Lingual Representation Alignment and Cross-Lingual Transfer Emerge in Multilingual Models?

arXiv:2404.12444v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Many pretrained multilingual models exhibit cross-lingual transfer ability, which is often attributed to a learned language-neutral representation during pretraining. However, it remains unclear what factors contribute to the learning of a language-neutral representation, and whether the learned language-neutral representation suffices to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. We propose a synthetic task, Multilingual Othello (mOthello), as a testbed to delve into these two questions. We find that: (1) models trained with naive multilingual pretraining fail to learn a …

abstract alignment arxiv cross-lingual cs.ai cs.cl however language multilingual multilingual models pretraining representation transfer type