Same Neurons, Different Languages: Probing Morphosyntax in Multilingual Pre-trained Models

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The success of multilingual pre-trained models is underpinned by their ability to learn representations shared by multiple languages even in absence of any explicit supervision. However, it remains unclear how these models learn to generalise across languages. In this work, we conjecture that multilingual pretrained models can derive language-universal abstractions about grammar. In particular, we investigate whether morphosyntactic information is encoded in the same subset of neurons in different languages. We conduct the first large-scale empirical study over 43 languages and 14 morphosyntactic categories with a state-of-the-art neuron-level probe. Our findings show that the cross-lingual overlap between neurons is significant, but its extent may vary across categories and depends on language proximity and pre-training data size.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2022
Pages1589-1598
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917711
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: 10 Jul 202215 Jul 2022

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022
LandUnited States
BySeattle
Periode10/07/202215/07/2022
SponsorAmazon, Bloomberg, et al., Google Research, LIVE PERSON, Meta

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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