# Enhancing Multilingual Embeddings via Multi-Way Parallel Text Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21543 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21543/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Alignment of Contextual Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03518/) (2020)
- [When is BERT Multilingual? Isolating Crucial Ingredients for Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14782/) (2021)
- [Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06228/) (2024)
- [Encoder vs Decoder: Comparative Analysis of Encoder and Decoder Language Models on Multilingual NLU Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13469/) (2024)
- [Why Does Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation Fail? An Explanation and a Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17325/) (2023)
- [DICT-MLM: Improved Multilingual Pre-Training using Bilingual Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12566/) (2020)
- [PreAlign: Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer by Early Establishment of Multilingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16222/) (2024)
- [Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09148/) (2023)
- [ALIGN-MLM: Word Embedding Alignment is Crucial for Multilingual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08547/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multilingual pretraining typically lacks explicit alignment signals, leading to suboptimal cross-lingual alignment in the representation space. In this work, we show that training standard pretrained models for cross-lingual alignment with a multi-way parallel corpus in a diverse pool of languages can substantially improve multilingual and cross-lingual representations for NLU tasks. We construct a multi-way parallel dataset using translations of English text from an off-the-shelf NMT model for a pool of six target languages and achieve strong cross-lingual alignment through contrastive learning. This leads to substantial performance gains across both seen and unseen languages for multiple tasks from the MTEB benchmark evaluated for XLM-Roberta and multilingual BERT base models. Using a multi-way parallel corpus for contrastive training yields substantial gains on bitext mining (21.3%), semantic similarity (5.3%), and classification (28.4%) compared to English-centric (En-X) bilingually parallel data, where X is sampled from a pool of multiple target languages. Furthermore, finetuning mE5 model on a small dataset with multi-way parallelism significantly improves bitext mining compared to one without, underscoring the importance of multi-way cross-lingual supervision even for models already pretrained for high-quality sentence embeddings.