Clustering Pseudo Language Family in Multilingual Translation Models with Fisher Information Matrix

Xinyu Ma, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang


Abstract
In multilingual translation research, the comprehension and utilization of language families are of paramount importance. Nevertheless, clustering languages based solely on their ancestral families can yield suboptimal results due to variations in the datasets employed during the model’s training phase. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce an innovative method that leverages the fisher information matrix (FIM) to cluster language families, anchored on the multilingual translation model’s characteristics. We hypothesize that language pairs with similar effects on model parameters exhibit a considerable degree of linguistic congruence and should thus be grouped cohesively. This concept has led us to define pseudo language families. We provide an in-depth discussion regarding the inception and application of these pseudo language families. Empirical evaluations reveal that employing these pseudo language families enhances performance over conventional language families in adapting a multilingual translation model to unfamiliar language pairs. The proposed methodology may also be extended to scenarios requiring language similarity measurements. The source code and associated scripts can be accessed at https://github.com/ecoli-hit/PseudoFamily.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.851
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13794–13804
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.851
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.851
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyu Ma, Xuebo Liu, and Min Zhang. 2023. Clustering Pseudo Language Family in Multilingual Translation Models with Fisher Information Matrix. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13794–13804, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Clustering Pseudo Language Family in Multilingual Translation Models with Fisher Information Matrix (Ma et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.851.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.851.mp4