# Multilingual BERT has an accent: Evaluating English influences on fluency in multilingual models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05619/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01401/) (2020)
- [MTOP: A Comprehensive Multilingual Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09335/) (2020)
- [Lifting the Curse of Multilinguality by Pre-training Modular Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06266/) (2022)
- [Composable Sparse Fine-Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07560/) (2021)
- [Multilingual is not enough: BERT for Finnish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07076/) (2019)
- [AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08726/) (2021)
- [Revisiting the Primacy of English in Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16171/) (2021)
- [XL-WiC: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Semantic Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06478/) (2020)
- [GREEK-BERT: The Greeks visiting Sesame Street](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12014/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While multilingual language models can improve NLP performance on low-resource languages by leveraging higher-resource languages, they also reduce average performance on all languages (the 'curse of multilinguality'). Here we show another problem with multilingual models: grammatical structures in higher-resource languages bleed into lower-resource languages, a phenomenon we call grammatical structure bias. We show this bias via a novel method for comparing the fluency of multilingual models to the fluency of monolingual Spanish and Greek models: testing their preference for two carefully-chosen variable grammatical structures (optional pronoun-drop in Spanish and optional Subject-Verb ordering in Greek). We find that multilingual BERT is biased toward the English-like setting (explicit pronouns and Subject-Verb-Object ordering) as compared to our monolingual control language model. With our case studies, we hope to bring to light the fine-grained ways in which multilingual models can be biased,and encourage more linguistically-aware fluency evaluation.