Papers › It's not Greek to mBERT: Inducing Word-Level Translations from Multilingual BERT

It's not Greek to mBERT: Inducing Word-Level Translations from Multilingual BERT

16 Oct 2020arXiv:2010.08275archive 2025-07-28

Hila Gonen, Shauli Ravfogel, Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg

Recent works have demonstrated that multilingual BERT (mBERT) learns rich cross-lingual representations, that allow for transfer across languages. We study the word-level translation information embedded in mBERT and present two simple methods that expose remarkable translation capabilities with no fine-tuning. The results suggest that most of this information is encoded in a non-linear way, while some of it can also be recovered with purely linear tools. As part of our analysis, we test the hypothesis that mBERT learns representations which contain both a language-encoding component and an abstract, cross-lingual component, and explicitly identify an empirical language-identity subspace within mBERT representations.

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