# A Morphology-Based Investigation of Positional Encodings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04530 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04530/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03894/) (2019)
- [PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11828/) (2019)
- [Assessing BERT's Syntactic Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05287/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Beyond Early-Token Bias: Model-Specific and Language-Specific Position Effects in Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16134/) (2025)
- [MERLIN: Multi-Stage Curriculum Alignment for Multilingual Encoder-LLM Integration in Cross-Lingual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08105/) (2025)
- [On the Interplay between Positional Encodings, Morphological Complexity, and Word Order Flexibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08139/) (2025)
- [CSSL: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Dependency Parsing on Relatively Free Word Ordered and Morphologically Rich Low Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06944/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models through positional encodings. This prompts a fundamental inquiry: Is there a correlation between the morphological complexity of a language and the utilization of positional encoding in pre-trained language models? In pursuit of an answer, we present the first study addressing this question, encompassing 22 languages and 5 downstream tasks. Our findings reveal that the importance of positional encoding diminishes with increasing morphological complexity in languages. Our study motivates the need for a deeper understanding of positional encoding, augmenting them to better reflect the different languages under consideration.