Challenge: Multilingual pre-trained language models have shown impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose to apply multilingual adaptive fine-tuning to 17 most-resourced African languages and three other high-resource languages to encourage cross-lingual transfer learning.
Outcome: The proposed approach is competitive to LAFT on individual languages while requiring significantly less disk space.

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Modular Monolingual Adaptation using Pretrained Language Models (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to building monolingual models for low-resource languages require a full model tuning process.
Approach: They propose a modular approach to build monolingual models for low-resource languages by finetuning the whole model on the target language.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on natural language understanding tasks on Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Quechua with Quechuan being a very low-resource language.
Mini But Mighty: Efficient Multilingual Pretraining with Linguistically-Informed Data Selection (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: AfriBERTa shows that training transformer models from scratch on 1GB of data from many unrelated African languages outperforms massively multilingual models on downstream NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose that training on smaller amounts of data but from related languages could match the performance of models trained on large, unrelated data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms models trained on large, unrelated datasets on downstream NLP tasks.
MultiFiT: Efficient Multi-lingual Language Model Fine-tuning (D19-1)

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Challenge: Pretrained language models require unlabelled data for training, while cross-lingual models underperform on low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a multi-lingual language model fine-tuning to train and fine- tune language models efficiently in their own language.
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Efficient Unseen Language Adaptation for Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multilingual pre-trained language models (mPLMs) have demonstrated notable effectiveness in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks.
Approach: They propose a method that uses soft-prompt tuning to tune for language adaptation . prompt tuning outperforms continuously trained baselines on two benchmarks .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baselines on two text classification benchmarks while utilizing 0.28% of tuned parameters.
Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Massively multilingual models are known to have limited utility in any one language, and to perform poorly on low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose to adapt a pre-trained multilingual model to a language family and evaluate its performance on two downstream tasks and 11 evaluation languages.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms mono- and multilingual models on two downstream tasks and 11 evaluation languages.
Recipes for Adapting Pre-trained Monolingual and Multilingual Models to Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have improved performance on low-resource language pairs.
Approach: They propose to freeze most BART parameters and add new ones to fine-tune a model trained on MT.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms naive fine-tuning on Vietnamese to English on a training set for Vietnamese to Vietnamese . the proposed model is able to fine- tune on smaller datasets while still maintaining the same model performance.
Effective Fine-Tuning Methods for Cross-lingual Adaptation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large scale multilingual pre-trained language models have shown promising results in zero- and few-shot cross-lingual tasks.
Approach: They propose a co-tuning method that aims to learn more generalized semantic equivalences when the languages are structurally dissimilar.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on cross-lingual inference and review tasks by capturing the semantic relationship in the parallel data when a few translation pairs are available.
UNKs Everywhere: Adapting Multilingual Language Models to New Scripts (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Massively multilingual language models offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks, but there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages.
Approach: They propose a series of data-efficient methods that enable quick and effective adaptation of pretrained multilingual models to low-resource languages and unseen scripts.
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Multilingual Encoder Knows more than You Realize: Shared Weights Pretraining for Extremely Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: XLM-R and mBART have advanced multilingualism in NLP, but low-resource languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian are underserved.
Approach: They propose a framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages by reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder.
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