Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.28924 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 Aug 2026]
Title:Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models
View a PDF of the paper titled Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models, by Sasha Boguraev and 3 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Linguistic theory has long recognized cross-linguistic syntactic regularities, leading to claims that these similar structures are processed by similar mechanisms. However, this hypothesis has been difficult to test empirically due to our lack of fine-grained, manipulable access of human processing mechanisms. In this work, we take advantage of techniques from mechanistic interpretability to study such a question in multilingual LMs. We first isolate language-internal mechanisms before attempting to transfer them cross-lingually. Across four models and three well-studied constructions (subject--verb number agreement, anaphoric pronoun gender agreement, and filler--gap object extraction) we find consistent cross-lingual mechanism transfer. We further find transfer to be graded, with more transfer between more typologically similar languages. We believe our work provides novel hypotheses about cross-linguistic syntactic structures and multilingual processing, and more broadly shows how the study of language models can help inform linguistic theory.
| Comments: | 20 Pages, 7 Figures, 11 Tables |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.28924 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.28924v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28924
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models, by Sasha Boguraev and 3 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.