| Challenge: | Existing models for high-resource languages are not available for all languages, and the vast majority of the world's languages are excluded from these models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained models to analyze the effect of the target language and its script on cross-lingual transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on six models pre-trained on NER and POS tasks in the original script and romanized version. |
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Cross-lingual Transfer of Monolingual Models (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on cross-lingual learning using multilingual models cast doubt on shared vocabulary and joint pre-training . et al. (2005) show that model knowledge learned in the source language enhances the learning of the target language independently of language proximity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for transferring monolingual models to other languages through continuous pre-training and investigate their results in English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a model trained from scratch in the GLUE benchmark for English . it shows that model knowledge from the source language enhances the learning of syntactic and semantic knowledge in english. |
Analyzing the Effect of Linguistic Similarity on Cross-Lingual Transfer: Tasks and Experimental Setups Matter (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on cross-lingual transfer often focuses on a small set of languages from a few language families and/or a single task. |
| Approach: | They analyze cross-lingual transfer for 263 languages from a wide variety of language families . they include three popular NLP tasks: POS tagging, dependency parsing, topic classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on linguistic similarity measures for 263 languages . the results show that the effect of linguistic similarities on transfer performance depends on a range of factors . |
CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration - a Step towards Cross-lingual Transfer beyond Textual Scripts (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer . despite recent advances in cross-linguistic research, most studies have restricted themselves to two major assumptions . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts to capture contact between these languages . they propose to use a benchmark dataset to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows for enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-linguistic transfer. |
Analyzing the Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Language Models (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in training multilingual models on large datasets have shown promising results in knowledge transfer across languages. |
| Approach: | They challenge the assumption that high zero-shot performance reflects high cross-lingual ability by introducing more challenging setups involving instances with multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high performance on multilingual benchmarks and on low-resource languages. |
Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-lingual transfer learning techniques involve human and machine translations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use machine translation to translate test set or training set to introduce subtle artifacts that have a notable impact in existing cross-lingual models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation process reduces the lexical overlap between the premise and hypothesis by 4.3 and 2.8 points . the proposed translation-test and zero-shot approaches improve on previous work . |
Measuring Cross-lingual Transfer in Bytes (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual pretraining models can transfer knowledge to target languages with minimal or no examples . underlying mechanisms for this transfer remain unclear, with hypotheses ranging from language contamination to syntactic similarity. |
| Approach: | They conducted an experiment to investigate whether multilingual models transfer knowledge to target languages . they found that models initialized from diverse languages perform similarly to a target language . |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that models initialized from diverse languages perform similarly to a target language in a cross-lingual setting. |
Make the Best of Cross-lingual Transfer: Evidence from POS Tagging with over 100 Languages (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on cross-lingual generalisability of large pre-trained models use English training data and test data in unseen languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual pre-trained models to model cross-lingual transfer in a selection of target languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve cross-lingual transfer performance in low-resource languages with no labeled training data. |
Scripts Through Time: A Survey of the Evolving Role of Transliteration in NLP (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual transfer is often hindered by the "script barrier" where differences in writing systems inhibit transfer learning . transliteration is a powerful technique to bridge this gap by increasing lexical overlap . authors present a taxonomy of key motivations to utilize transliterations in language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of key motivations to utilize transliterations in NLP . they analyze the evolution and effectiveness of these methods and discuss trade-offs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed transliteration technique is effective in cross-lingual NLP, the authors argue . the proposed translliteration method is a powerful tool to overcome the "script barrier" |
Language Contamination Helps Explains the Cross-lingual Capabilities of English Pretrained Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a large number of pretraining corpora are not publicly available, and it is unclear how much foreign language data exists in monolingual models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English pretraining corpora to analyze their language composition . they find that even when less than 1% of data is not English, it facilitates cross-lingual transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is not truly monolingual when pretrained at scale, the authors show . they show that even when less than 1% of data is not English, it facilitates cross-lingual transfer . |
Towards a Common Understanding of Contributing Factors for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Language Models: A Review (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models have shown a strong ability to transfer knowledge across languages. |
| Approach: | They examine factors contributing to the ability of MLLMs to perform zero-shot cross-lingual transfer . they identify consensuses among studies with consistent findings and resolve conflicts . |
| Outcome: | The authors outline and discuss factors that contribute to the ability of MLLMs to perform zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. |