Searching for Needles in a Haystack: On the Role of Incidental
  Bilingualism in PaLM's Translation Capability
Eleftheria Briakou Colin Cherry George Foster
Large, multilingual language models exhibit surprisingly good zero- or
few-shot machine translation capabilities, despite having never seen the
intentionally-included translation examples provided to typical neural
translation systems. We investigate the role of incidental bilingualism -- the
unintentional consumption of bilingual signals, including translation examples
-- in explaining the translation capabilities of large language models, taking
the Pathways Language Model (PaLM) as a case study. We introduce a mixed-method
approach to measure and understand incidental bilingualism at scale. We show
that PaLM is exposed to over 30 million translation pairs across at least 44
languages. Furthermore, the amount of incidental bilingual content is highly
correlated with the amount of monolingual in-language content for non-English
languages. We relate incidental bilingual content to zero-shot prompts and show
that it can be used to mine new prompts to improve PaLM's out-of-English
zero-shot translation quality. Finally, in a series of small-scale ablations,
we show that its presence has a substantial impact on translation capabilities,
although this impact diminishes with model scale.