# Deep Language Geometry: Constructing a Metric Space from LLM Weights

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11676/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09400/) (2023)
- [Probing Multilingual BERT for Genetic and Typological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02070/) (2020)
- [Exploring language relations through syntactic distances and geographic proximity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18430/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a novel framework that utilizes the internal weight activations of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct a metric space of languages. Unlike traditional approaches based on hand-crafted linguistic features, our method automatically derives high-dimensional vector representations by computing weight importance scores via an adapted pruning algorithm. Our approach captures intrinsic language characteristics that reflect linguistic phenomena. We validate our approach across diverse datasets and multilingual LLMs, covering 106 languages. The results align well with established linguistic families while also revealing unexpected inter-language connections that may indicate historical contact or language evolution. The source code, computed language latent vectors, and visualization tool are made publicly available at https://github.com/mshamrai/deep-language-geometry.