Abstract

Multilingual representations have mostly been evaluated based on their performance on specific tasks. In this article, we look beyond engineering goals and analyze the relations between lan- guages in computational representations. We introduce a methodology for comparing languages based on their organization of semantic concepts. We propose to conduct an adapted version of representational similarity analysis of a selected set of concepts in computational multilingual representations. Using this analysis method, we can reconstruct a phylogenetic tree that closely resembles those assumed by linguistic experts. These results indicate that multilingual distribu- tional representations which are only trained on monolingual text and bilingual dictionaries preserve relations between languages without the need for any etymological information. In addition, we propose a measure to identify semantic drift between language families. We perform experiments on word-based and sentence-based multilingual models and provide both quantita- tive results and qualitative examples. Analyses of semantic drift in multilingual representations can serve two purposes: they can indicate unwanted characteristics of the computational models and they provide a quantitative means to study linguistic phenomena across languages.