# On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Translation with Extensible Multilingual Pretraining and Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00401/) (2020)
- [Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09713/) (2019)
- [COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05465/) (2020)
- [Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10020/) (2022)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15207/) (2020)
- [Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12725/) (2020)
- [Multilingual LAMA: Investigating Knowledge in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00894/) (2021)
- [Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04721/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Slot Alignment and Recognition for Cross-Lingual NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14353/) (2020)
- [Machine Translationese: Effects of Algorithmic Bias on Linguistic Complexity in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00287/) (2021)
- [Looking for a Needle in a Haystack: A Comprehensive Study of Hallucinations in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05309/) (2022)
- [Unlocking Compositional Generalization in Pre-trained Models Using Intermediate Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07478/) (2021)
- [Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06688/) (2021)
- [Evaluating the Impact of Model Scale for Compositional Generalization in Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12253/) (2022)
- [Improving Compositional Generalization in Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05647/) (2020)
- [Translationese as a Language in "Multilingual" NMT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03823/) (2019)
- [Learning Algebraic Recombination for Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06516/) (2021)
- [Jump to better conclusions: SCAN both left and right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04640/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Poset Decoding for Compositional Generalization in Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07792/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Deciphering the Role of Representation Disentanglement: Investigating Compositional Generalization in CLIP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05897/) (2024)
- [Fake News Detection: Comparative Evaluation of BERT-like Models and Large Language Models with Generative AI-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14276/) (2024)
- [AdTEC: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Text Quality in Search Engine Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05906/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Data Can Mislead Evaluations: Membership Inference as Machine Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11786/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Structural Generalization in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13363/) (2024)
- [OYXOY: A Modern NLP Test Suite for Modern Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07009/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compositional generalization allows efficient learning and human-like inductive biases. Since most research investigating compositional generalization in NLP is done on English, important questions remain underexplored. Do the necessary compositional generalization abilities differ across languages? Can models compositionally generalize cross-lingually? As a first step to answering these questions, recent work used neural machine translation to translate datasets for evaluating compositional generalization in semantic parsing. However, we show that this entails critical semantic distortion. To address this limitation, we craft a faithful rule-based translation of the MCWQ dataset from English to Chinese and Japanese. Even with the resulting robust benchmark, which we call MCWQ-R, we show that the distribution of compositions still suffers due to linguistic divergences, and that multilingual models still struggle with cross-lingual compositional generalization. Our dataset and methodology will be useful resources for the study of cross-lingual compositional generalization in other tasks.