Prior research has investigated the impact of various linguistic features on cross-lingual transfer performance. In this study, we investigate the manner in which this effect can be mapped onto the representation space. While past studies have focused on the impact on cross-lingual alignment in multilingual language models during fine-tuning, this study examines the absolute evolution of the respective language representation spaces produced by MLLMs. We place a specific emphasis on the role of linguistic characteristics and investigate their inter-correlation with the impact on representation spaces and cross-lingual transfer performance. Additionally, this paper provides preliminary evidence of how these findings can be leveraged to enhance transfer to linguistically distant languages.

翻译：先前研究已探讨了各类语言特征对跨语言迁移性能的影响。在本研究中，我们探究这种效应如何映射到表示空间上。以往研究主要关注微调过程中多语言语言模型内部的跨语言对齐影响，而本研究则考察多语言语言模型所产生的各语言表示空间的绝对演化过程。我们特别强调语言特征的作用，并探讨其与表示空间变化及跨语言迁移性能之间的相互关联。此外，本文提供了初步证据，表明如何利用这些发现来促进向语言距离较远的语言进行迁移。