Cross-lingual transfer (XLT) driven by massively multilingual language models (mmLMs) has been shown largely ineffective for low-resource (LR) target languages with little (or no) representation in mmLM’s pretraining, especially if they are linguistically distant from the high-resource (HR) source language. Much of the recent focus in XLT research has been dedicated to LR language families, i.e., families without any HR languages (e.g., families of African languages or indigenous languages of the Americas). In this work, in contrast, we investigate a configuration that is arguably of practical relevance for more of the world’s languages: XLT to LR languages that do have a close HR relative. To explore the extent to which a HR language can facilitate transfer to its LR relatives, we (1) introduce Kardeş-NLU, an evaluation benchmark with language understanding datasets in five LR Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Uyghur; and (2) investigate (a) intermediate training and (b) fine-tuning strategies that leverage Turkish in XLT to these target languages. Our experimental results show that both - integrating Turkish in intermediate training and in downstream fine-tuning - yield substantial improvements in XLT to LR Turkic languages. Finally, we benchmark cutting-edge instruction-tuned large language models on Kardeş-NLU, showing that their performance is highly task- and language-dependent.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved superhuman performance on many benchmarks, creating a need for harder tasks. We introduce CoDA21 (Context Definition Alignment), a challenging benchmark that measures natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities of PLMs: Given a definition and a context each for k words, but not the words themselves, the task is to align the k definitions with the k contexts. CoDA21 requires a deep understanding of contexts and definitions, including complex inference and world knowledge. We find that there is a large gap between human and PLM performance, suggesting that CoDA21 measures an aspect of NLU that is not sufficiently covered in existing benchmarks.

After a period of decrease, interest in word alignments is increasing again for their usefulness in domains such as typological research, cross-lingual annotation projection and machine translation. Generally, alignment algorithms only use bitext and do not make use of the fact that many parallel corpora are multiparallel. Here, we compute high-quality word alignments between multiple language pairs by considering all language pairs together. First, we create a multiparallel word alignment graph, joining all bilingual word alignment pairs in one graph. Next, we use graph neural networks (GNNs) to exploit the graph structure. Our GNN approach (i) utilizes information about the meaning, position and language of the input words, (ii) incorporates information from multiple parallel sentences, (iii) adds and removes edges from the initial alignments, and (iv) yields a prediction model that can generalize beyond the training sentences. We show that community detection algorithms can provide valuable information for multiparallel word alignment. Our method outperforms previous work on three word alignment datasets and on a downstream task.

With the advent of end-to-end deep learning approaches in machine translation, interest in word alignments initially decreased; however, they have again become a focus of research more recently. Alignments are useful for typological research, transferring formatting like markup to translated texts, and can be used in the decoding of machine translation systems. At the same time, massively multilingual processing is becoming an important NLP scenario, and pretrained language and machine translation models that are truly multilingual are proposed. However, most alignment algorithms rely on bitexts only and do not leverage the fact that many parallel corpora are multiparallel. In this work, we exploit the multiparallelity of corpora by representing an initial set of bilingual alignments as a graph and then predicting additional edges in the graph. We present two graph algorithms for edge prediction: one inspired by recommender systems and one based on network link prediction. Our experimental results show absolute improvements in F1 of up to 28% over the baseline bilingual word aligner in different datasets.

Recent progress in pretraining language models on large corpora has resulted in significant performance gains on many NLP tasks. These large models acquire linguistic knowledge during pretraining, which helps to improve performance on downstream tasks via fine-tuning. To assess what kind of knowledge is acquired, language models are commonly probed by querying them with ‘fill in the blank’ style cloze questions. Existing probing datasets mainly focus on knowledge about relations between words and entities. We introduce WDLMPro (Word Definitions Language Model Probing) to evaluate word understanding directly using dictionary definitions of words. In our experiments, three popular pretrained language models struggle to match words and their definitions. This indicates that they understand many words poorly and that our new probing task is a difficult challenge that could help guide research on LMs in the future.