mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Learning Language Representations for Typology Prediction

arXiv 1707.09569 ↗First posted 29 Jul 2017cs.CLcited by 40

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Abstract (arXiv)

One central mystery of neural NLP is what neural models "know" about their subject matter. When a neural machine translation system learns to translate from one language to another, does it learn the syntax or semantics of the languages? Can this knowledge be extracted from the system to fill holes in human scientific knowledge? Existing typological databases contain relatively full feature specifications for only a few hundred languages. Exploiting the existence of parallel texts in more than a thousand languages, we build a massive many-to-one neural machine translation (NMT) system from 1017 languages into English, and use this to predict information missing from typological databases. Experiments show that the proposed method is able to infer not only syntactic, but also phonological and phonetic inventory features, and improves over a baseline that has access to information about the languages' geographic and phylogenetic neighbors.

Key facts. Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2017.

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 6; 2022: 6; 2023: 10; 2024: 12; 2025: 2; 2026: 4.

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  1. 2021BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generationcited by 722
  2. 2021The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 560
  3. 2022Language Contamination Helps Explain the Cross-lingual Capabilities of English Pretrained Modelscited by 92
  4. 2022Analyzing the Mono- and Cross-Lingual Pretraining Dynamics of Multilingual Language Modelscited by 32
  5. 2023Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer language selection using linguistic similaritycited by 28
  6. 2024Can LLMs Really Learn to Translate a Low-Resource Language from One Grammar Book?cited by 23
  7. 2023InstructAlign: High-and-Low Resource Language Alignment via Continual Crosslingual Instruction Tuningcited by 21
  8. 2023Cultural Compass: Predicting Transfer Learning Success in Offensive Language Detection with Cultural Featurescited by 18
  9. 2022Cross-Lingual Retrieval Augmented Prompt for Low-Resource Languagescited by 17
  10. 2021Does Typological Blinding Impede Cross-Lingual Sharing?cited by 9
  11. 2023Language Embeddings Sometimes Contain Typological Generalizationscited by 9
  12. 2024Multilingual Gradient Word-Order Typology from Universal Dependenciescited by 9
28 more
  1. 2021Language Embeddings for Typology and Cross-lingual Transfer Learningcited by 8
  2. 2021A Massively Multilingual Analysis of Cross-linguality in Shared Embedding Spacecited by 8
  3. 2023Bridging the Language Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMscited by 8
  4. 2023Neural Machine Translation for the Indigenous Languages of the Americas: An Introductioncited by 7
  5. 2023The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLPcited by 7
  6. 2024Large Language Models are Easily Confused: A Quantitative Metric, Security Implications and Typological Analysiscited by 7
  7. 2022Polyglot Prompt: Multilingual Multitask PrompTrainingcited by 6
  8. 2024Adaptive Cross-lingual Text Classification through In-Context One-Shot Demonstrationscited by 6
  9. 2024No Train but Gain: Language Arithmetic for training-free Language Adapters enhancementcited by 5
  10. 2025Breaking Physical and Linguistic Borders: Multilingual Federated Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Languagescited by 5
  11. 2022Meta-XNLG: A Meta-Learning Approach Based on Language Clustering for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Generationcited by 4
  12. 2024UniBridge: A Unified Approach to Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languagescited by 4
  13. 2021Low-Resource Machine Translation Training Curriculum Fit for Low-Resource Languagescited by 3
  14. 2023Towards a Deep Understanding of Multilingual End-to-End Speech Translationcited by 3
  15. 2023Colexifications for Bootstrapping Cross-lingual Datasets: The Case of Phonology, Concreteness, and Affectivenesscited by 2
  16. 2024Decomposed Prompting: Probing Multilingual Linguistic Structure Knowledge in Large Language Modelscited by 2
  17. 2024LangSAMP: Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretrainingcited by 2
  18. 2025M-Wanda: Improving One-Shot Pruning for Multilingual LLMscited by 2
  19. 2026Leveraging Routing Dynamics in Mixture-of-Experts Models for Efficient Language Adaptationcited by 2
  20. 2022Informative Language Representation Learning for Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translationcited by 1
  21. 2023Multilingual Word Embeddings for Low-Resource Languages using Anchors and a Chain of Related Languagescited by 1
  22. 2024No Optimal Language Set Exists for Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Insights from a Linguistically-Informed Studycited by 1
  23. 2024Patterns of Persistence and Diffusibility across the World's Languagescited by 0
  24. 2024MaiNLP at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Analyzing Source Language Selection in Cross-Lingual Textual Relatednesscited by 0
  25. 2024Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Multilingual Multimodal Models for Low-resource ASRcited by 0
  26. 2026Typological Feature Prediction with Large Language Models: An In-Context Learning Approachcited by 0
  27. 2026Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inferencecited by 0
  28. 2026Zero-shot Dependency Parsing with Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Bootstrappingcited by 0