arXiv Computation and Language

Dialects of Translationese Shape Language Model Learning

The paper investigates how machine‑translated English data from 24 diverse source languages influences small English language models. It finds that source language affects model behavior: lexical diversity drives overall perplexity, while grammatical performance correlates with typological similarity to English when sufficient data is used. Additionally, translation quality strongly predicts language‑modeling performance.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Beyond the Final Layer: Intermediate Representations for Better Multilingual Calibration in Large Language Models

The paper investigates multilingual confidence calibration in large language models, revealing that non‑English languages are systematically less well calibrated than English. By analyzing internal representations, the authors find that late‑intermediate layers provide a more reliable confidence signal than the final layer, which is biased by English‑centric training. They propose training‑free methods such as Language‑Aware Confidence Ensemble (LACE) to adaptively select optimal layers per language, aiming to improve global equity and trustworthiness of LLMs.

By Ej Zhou, Caiqi Zhang, Tiancheng Hu, Chengzu Li, Nigel Collier, Ivan Vuli\'c, Anna Korhonen
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Cross-Lingual Alignment Without Joint Training: Do Monolingual Language Models Converge on Universal Representations?

The study investigates whether monolingual language models, trained without joint multilingual objectives, develop cross-lingual alignment. By evaluating models such as Goldfish and independently built monolingual systems, the authors find that alignable representational geometry emerges across layers, strengthening with larger data, larger models, or closer linguistic proximity. A single Procrustes rotation on parallel sentences can map hidden states between models, and applying this rotation to a German model’s residuals swaps factual predictions to those of the donor English model, demonstrating functional transfer.

By Ej Zhou, Suchir Salhan, Catherine Arnett, Anna Korhonen
arXiv AI
Jul 9

DiaLLM: An Investigation into the Robustness-Generation Gap in English Dialect Adaptation

arXiv:2607. 07669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly \emph{understand} dialectal English, yet still \emph{produce} only standard, US-leaning English, leaving dialectal generation, the harder half of the problem, largely unaddressed.

By Jordan Painter, Dipankar Srirag, Adarsh Kappiyath, Diptesh Kanojia, Aditya Joshi, Lu Yin
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Copy First, Translate Later: Interpreting Translation Dynamics in Multilingual Pretraining

Large language models show strong cross‑lingual abilities, but previous studies have examined them only at isolated training points. This work pretrains a 1.7B multilingual model on nine languages, recording checkpoints at fine granularity to track translation development. Using word‑level translation and a new dataset, the authors find that early learning is dominated by token‑level copying and surface similarities, while later stages involve more general translation mechanisms and refined copying.

By Felicia K\"orner, Maria Matveev, Florian Eichin, Gitta Kutyniok, Barbara Plank, Michael A. Hedderich
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Adapting English Quality Classifiers for Multilingual LLM Pretraining Data Selection

The paper proposes a multilingual adaptation of an English quality classifier to select high‑quality training data for large language model pretraining across more than 100 languages. The method trains a small multi‑layer perceptron on Transformer embeddings, using machine‑translated text scored by the English classifier as labels. Experiments on 1B, 3B, and 8B parameter models show that the adapted classifier preserves benchmark performance and regional knowledge, and it generalizes to unseen languages by learning the original scoring criteria.

By Vinko Sabol\v{c}ec, Bettina Messmer, Yassine Turki, Martin Jaggi
arXiv AI
Sep 4

One Model to Translate Them All? A Journey to Mount Doom for Multilingual Model Merging

The paper investigates weight‑space merging of independently fine‑tuned multilingual machine translation models. Experiments show that merging is more successful when models share a target language, yet it still cannot match the peak performance of language‑specific checkpoints. When target languages differ, performance drops sharply, and analysis reveals that overlapping neuron activation and incompatible upper‑layer geometries cause these failures.

By Baban Gain, Trilok Nath Singh, Asif Ekbal