Explored BLOOM-1.7B’s multilingual capabilities via word embedding similarity, multilingual NLI probing (XNLI), and cross-lingual transferability. Analyzed embedding alignment, layer-wise semantic encoding, and zero-shot performance on low-resource languages.
# How Does a Multilingual LM Handle Multiple Languages?
## Abstract
In this study, we explore the multilingual capabilities of the pre-trained **BLOOM-1.7B** model through a series of tasks: **similarity between word embeddings across languages**, **probing for language understanding**, and **cross-lingual transferability**. The results show that BLOOM-1.7B effectively encodes semantic relationships across languages and demonstrates cross-lingual transferability, with performance depending on **language similarity** and **resource availability**. Our analysis offers insights into BLOOM’s potential for **zero-shot learning** in low-resource languages.
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## 1 Introduction
### 1.1 Background
Transformer-based LLMs have shown great progress in multilingual NLP. Understanding what linguistic information these models capture—syntax, semantics, morphology—is critical. Probing techniques allow us to analyze model representations and cross-lingual capabilities.
This project investigates the multilingual abilities of **BLOOM-1.7B**, focusing on:
- Word embedding similarity across languages
- Probing for syntactic and semantic understanding
- Cross-lingual transferability to low-resource languages
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## 2 Related Work
- Models: **BERT**, **XLM-R**, **mBART**, **mBERT**, **GPT-based**
- Probing studies show higher transformer layers capture semantics; lower layers syntax
- Cross-lingual transfer critical for **low-resource languages**
- Embedding alignment (e.g. **MUSE**) remains a key challenge
BLOOM-1.7B leverages **shared subword tokenization** and **cross-lingual pretraining**, providing a promising architecture for multilingual tasks.
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## 3 Methodology
### Task 1: Similarity between Word Embeddings
- 992 words translated into **English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi**
- Embeddings extracted, normalized, compared using **cosine similarity**
- Results show consistent semantic alignment across languages
### Task 2: Probing to Understand Model Behavio …