{"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/its-not-greek-to-mbert-inducing-word-level","title":"It’s not Greek to mBERT: Inducing Word-Level Translations from Multilingual BERT","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2020-11-01","proceeding":"EMNLP (BlackboxNLP) 2020 11","authors":["Hila Gonen","Shauli Ravfogel","Yanai Elazar","Yoav Goldberg"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2020.blackboxnlp-1.5","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2020.blackboxnlp-1.5.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":"its-not-greek-to-mbert-inducing-word-level","repo_url":"https://github.com/gonenhila/mbert","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"mbert","method_name":"mBERT"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}