> zero shot translation shows the models really develop an interlingua, a semantic representation, otherwise they wouldn't be able to translate between unseen p

> zero shot translation shows the models really develop an interlingua, a semantic representation, otherwise they wouldn't be able to translate between unseen pairs of languages In the zero shot language tasks the following were trained: English -> Japanese Japanese -> English English -> Korean Korean -> English And the zero shot language tasks were: Japanese -> Korean Korean -> Japanese It seems that this proves there is a transitive property to language. Making the jump from trained Japanese -> English -> Korean and Korean -> English -> Japanese to Japanese -> Korean and Korean -> Japanese could be accomplished without an independent semantic representation, taking advantage only of transitive properties. It would require some earlier layers in the network coding for some Japanese -> English and some later layers in the network coding for some English -> Korean with the equivalent for transitive Korean -> Japanese. I'm not sure it proves the development of an independent semantic representation outside the direct language translation. Or at least independent semantic representation is a much stronger claim.