{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/are-structural-concepts-universal-in","title":"Are Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization","arxiv_id":"2310.12794","date":"2023-10-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ningyu Xu","Qi Zhang","Jingting Ye","Menghan Zhang","Xuanjing Huang"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for low-resource ones, which poses an ongoing challenge. It is unclear whether we have reached the limits of implicit cross-lingual generalization and if explicit knowledge transfer is viable. In this paper, we investigate the potential for explicitly aligning conceptual correspondence between languages to enhance cross-lingual generalization. Using the syntactic aspect of language as a testbed, our analyses of 43 languages reveal a high degree of alignability among the spaces of structural concepts within each language for both encoder-only and decoder-only LLMs. We then propose a meta-learning-based method to learn to align conceptual spaces of different languages, which facilitates zero-shot and few-shot generalization in concept classification and also offers insights into the cross-lingual in-context learning phenomenon. Experiments on syntactic analysis tasks show that our approach achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and narrows the performance gap between languages, particularly benefiting those with limited resources.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12794v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.12794v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"are-structural-concepts-universal-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/ningyuxu/structural_concepts_correspondence","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.12794","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}