The Same But Different: Structural Similarities and Differences in
  Multilingual Language Modeling
Authors: name: Ruochen Zhang; name: Qinan Yu; name: Matianyu Zang; name: Carsten Eickhoff; name: Ellie Pavlick
Published: 2024-10-11 19:57:55

Abstract: We employ new tools from mechanistic interpretability in order to ask whether
the internal structure of large language models (LLMs) shows correspondence to
the linguistic structures which underlie the languages on which they are
trained. In particular, we ask (1) when two languages employ the same
morphosyntactic processes, do LLMs handle them using shared internal circuitry?
and (2) when two languages require different morphosyntactic processes, do LLMs
handle them using different internal circuitry? Using English and Chinese
multilingual and monolingual models, we analyze the internal circuitry involved
in two tasks. We find evidence that models employ the same circuit to handle
the same syntactic process independently of the language in which it occurs,
and that this is the case even for monolingual models trained completely
independently. Moreover, we show that multilingual models employ
language-specific components (attention heads and feed-forward networks) when
needed to handle linguistic processes (e.g., morphological marking) that only
exist in some languages. Together, our results provide new insights into how
LLMs trade off between exploiting common structures and preserving linguistic
differences when tasked with modeling multiple languages simultaneously.