Probing Cross-lingual Transfer of XLM Multi-language Model

This paper investigates the ability of XLM language model to transfer linguistic knowledge cross-lingually, verifying if and to which extent syntactic dependency relationships learnt in a language are maintained in other languages. In detail, a structural probe is developed to analyse the cross-lingual syntactic transfer capability of XLM model and comparison of cross-language syntactic transfer among languages belonging to different families from a typological classification, which are characterised by very different syntactic constructions. The probe aims to reconstruct the dependency parse tree of a sentence in order to representing the input sentences with the contextual embeddings from XLM layers. The results of the experimental assessment improved the previous results obtained using mBERT model.