Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Causal Interventions Reveal Typologically Organized Syntactic Mechanisms in Multilingual Language Models
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)
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