{"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/bert-is-not-an-interlingua-and-the-bias-of","title":"BERT is Not an Interlingua and the Bias of Tokenization","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2019-11-01","proceeding":"WS 2019 11","authors":["Jasdeep Singh","Bryan McCann","Richard Socher","Caiming Xiong"],"abstract":"Multilingual transfer learning can benefit both high- and low-resource languages, but the source of these improvements is not well understood. Cananical Correlation Analysis (CCA) of the internal representations of a pre- trained, multilingual BERT model reveals that the model partitions representations for each language rather than using a common, shared, interlingual space. This effect is magnified at deeper layers, suggesting that the model does not progressively abstract semantic con- tent while disregarding languages. Hierarchical clustering based on the CCA similarity scores between languages reveals a tree structure that mirrors the phylogenetic trees hand- designed by linguists. The subword tokenization employed by BERT provides a stronger bias towards such structure than character- and word-level tokenizations. We release a subset of the XNLI dataset translated into an additional 14 languages at https://www.github.com/salesforce/xnli{\\_}extension to assist further research into multilingual representations.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/D19-6106","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/D19-6106.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":"bert-is-not-an-interlingua-and-the-bias-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/salesforce/xnli_extension","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"an-extension-of-xnli","name":"An Extension of XNLI","full_name":"An Extension of XNLI"}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}