Papers › Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT: How Good is It and How...
Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT: How Good is It and How Does It Affect Transfer?
Ningyu Xu, Tao Gui, Ruotian Ma, Qi Zhang, Jingting Ye, Menghan Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demonstrated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, whereby it enables effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of syntactic knowledge. The transfer is more successful between some languages, but it is not well understood what leads to this variation and whether it fairly reflects difference between languages. In this work, we investigate the distributions of grammatical relations induced from mBERT in the context of 24 typologically different languages. We demonstrate that the distance between the distributions of different languages is highly consistent with the syntactic difference in terms of linguistic formalisms. Such difference learnt via self-supervision plays a crucial role in the zero-shot transfer performance and can be predicted by variation in morphosyntactic properties between languages. These results suggest that mBERT properly encodes languages in a way consistent with linguistic diversity and provide insights into the mechanism of cross-lingual transfer.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections