Cross-lingual alignment, the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models, has been an active field of research in recent years. We survey the literature of techniques to improve cross-lingual alignment, providing a taxonomy of methods and summarising insights from throughout the field. We present different understandings of cross-lingual alignment and their limitations. We provide a qualitative summary of results from a large number of surveyed papers. Finally, we discuss how these insights may be applied not only to encoder models, where this topic has been heavily studied, but also to encoder-decoder or even decoder-only models, and argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key.

近年来，跨语言对齐是多语言语言模型研究的一个活跃领域。本文概述了改进跨语言对齐的技术方法，并总结了该领域的见解。我们提供了对大量论文的定性总结结果。最后，我们讨论了这些见解不仅适用于已经深入研究这一主题的编码器模型，还适用于编码器-解码器甚至只有解码器的模型，并指出平衡语言中立和语言特定信息的有效权衡是关键。

跨语言对齐的理解--综述