Probing Multilingual Cognate Prediction Models

Abstract

Character-based neural machine translation models have become the reference models for cognate prediction, a historical linguistics task. So far, all linguistic interpretations about latent information captured by such models have been based on external analysis (accuracy, raw results, errors). In this paper, we investigate what probing can tell us about both models and previous interpretations, and learn that though our models store linguistic and diachronic information, they do not achieve it in previously assumed ways.