Multilingual Language Models offer a way to incorporate multiple languages in one model and utilize cross-language transfer learning to improve performance for different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite progress in multilingual models, not all languages are supported as well, particularly in low-resource settings. In this work, we investigate the linguistic representation of different languages in multilingual models. We start by asking the question which languages are supported in popular multilingual models and which languages are left behind. Then, for included languages, we look at models' learned representations based on language family and dialect and try to understand how models' learned representations for~(1) seen and~(2) unseen languages vary across different language groups. In addition, we test and analyze performance on downstream tasks such as text generation and Named Entity Recognition. We observe from our experiments that community-centered models -- models that focus on languages of a given family or geographical location and are built by communities who speak them -- perform better at distinguishing between languages in the same family for low-resource languages. Our paper contributes to the literature in understanding multilingual models and their shortcomings and offers insights on potential ways to improve them.

通过研究多语言模型的语言学表示，我们发现针对低资源语言，以某个语言家族或地理位置为重点且由这些语言使用者构建的社区中心模型在区分同一语言家族的语言方面表现更好，有助于理解多语言模型的问题并提供改进方法。

多语言模型中的语言表示研究