Papers with cross-lingual tasks
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer With Learned Projections Using Unlabeled Target-Language Data (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is enabled by pairing the language adapter in the target language with an appropriate task adapter within a source language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unlabeled text to enhance zero-shot transfer by pairing language adapters with task adapters in a target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three cross-lingual tasks with up to 11% relative improvement in Named Entity Recognition (NER), Question Answering (QA) and Natural Language Inference (NLI). |
COSY: COunterfactual SYntax for Cross-Lingual Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained multilingual language models suffer from a large performance gap between source and target languages . e.g., multilingual-BERT models are widely used in cross-lingual tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a language-agnostic approach to integrate universal syntax into language models . they use SYntax-aware networks and a COunterfactual training method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on natural language inference and question answering without auxiliary training data. |
Mixed-Lingual Pre-training for Cross-lingual Summarization (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims at producing a summary in the target language for an article in the source language. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-lingual pre-training scheme that leverages both cross-lingual tasks such as translation and monolingual tasks like masked language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the translation and masked language models with no task-specific components and saves memory. |
Saliency-based Multi-View Mixed Language Training for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Classification (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent multilingual pre-trained models have been demonstrated effective in many cross-lingual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages code-switched data with multi-view learning to fine-tune XLM-R. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on zero-shot cross-lingual sentiment classification and dialogue state tracking tasks. |
nmT5 - Is parallel data still relevant for pre-training massively multilingual language models? (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that cross-lingual transfer learning in pre-trained multilingual models could be improved further by incorporating parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate parallel data into mT5 pre-training to improve results on downstream multilingual and cross-lingual tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transfer significantly in small fine-tuning datasets and small model sizes. |
Modular Sentence Encoders: Separating Language Specialization from Cross-Lingual Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual sentence encoders are often trained to map sentences from different languages into a shared semantic vector space . cross-lingual alignment training distorts optimal monolingual structure of semantic spaces of individual languages . a modular solution can be used for cross-linguistic tasks such as cross-language semantic similarity and zero-shot transfer . |
| Approach: | They propose a modular training system that embeds sentences from different languages into a shared semantic vector space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves better performance across all tasks compared to monolithic models. |
Steering into New Embedding Spaces: Analyzing Cross-Lingual Alignment Induced by Model Interventions in Multilingual Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Anirudh Sundar, Sinead Williamson, Katherine Metcalf, Barry-John Theobald, Skyler Seto, Masha Fedzechkina
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on a variety of tasks from text summarization to zero-shot common-sense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to manipulate the embedding space of mLLMs by manipulating its activations to steer generation into the desired direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model interventions improves alignment of cross-lingual representations in multilingual large language models with up to 2x improvements in top-1 accuracy on cross-linguistic retrieval tasks. |
mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Saksham Singhal, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on monolingual texts, but it has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a partially non-autoregressive objective for text-to-text pre-training and propose mT6 to improve cross-lingual transferability over multilingual T5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability over existing models. |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Lingual Transfer with Pseudo Partial Labels (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train pre-trained language models for zero-shot cross-lingual tasks are noisy and lack confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose an uncertainty-aware cross-lingual transfer framework with pseudo-partial-label to maximize the utilization of unlabeled data by reducing noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on named entity recognition and natural language inference tasks on 40 languages. |
The Secret is in the Spectra: Predicting Cross-lingual Task Performance with Spectral Similarity Measures (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that bilingual lexicon induction is influenced by the (dis)similarity of the languages at hand. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the isomorphism of monolingual embedding spaces based on their spectra and introduce isometric measures to measure their similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measures outperform standard isomorphism measures while being more tractable and easier to interpret. |
Towards Debiasing Translation Artifacts (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show translation artifacts in translations influence performance of cross-lingual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce translation artifacts by extending an established bias-removal technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces translationese at sentence and word level . it is the first study to debias translations on a natural language inference task . |
VECO: Variable and Flexible Cross-lingual Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work in multilingual pretraining relies on the shared vocabulary and bilingual contexts to encourage the correlation across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to plug a cross-attention module into a Transformer encoder to explicitly build the interdependence between languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on XTREME and English-to-French translation datasets. |
CINO: A Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual pre-trained language models do not perform well on some low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual pre-trained language model for Chinese minority languages . they collect documents from Wikipedia and construct two classification datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various classification tasks. |
Cross-Lingual NLU: Mitigating Language-Specific Impact in Embeddings Leveraging Adversarial Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages and computational expenses pose significant challenges in the domain of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that uses adversarial techniques to mitigate the impact of language-specific information in contextual embeddings generated by large multilingual language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach excels in zero-shot scenarios for Latin languages like Spanish, but fails to perform for languages distant from English, such as Thai and Persian. |
Towards Multi-Sense Cross-Lingual Alignment of Contextual Embeddings (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn cross-lingual word embeddings are sense agnostic . a novel framework to align contextual embeddables at the sense level is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to align contextual embeddings at the sense level by leveraging cross-lingual signal from bilingual dictionaries only. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves word sense disambiguation tasks by leveraging bilingual dictionaries . compared with baseline results, the proposed models achieve 0.52%, 2.09% and 1.29% performance improvements . |
Vocabulary-informed Language Encoding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | A Multilingual model relies on language encodings to identify input languages . a method to compute a vocabulary-informed language coding can improve multilingual models . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to compute a vocabulary-informed language encoding as the language representation for a required language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on unsupervised translation and cross-lingual embedding. |
LAReQA: Language-Agnostic Answer Retrieval from a Multilingual Pool (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | LAReQA tests for “strong” cross-lingual alignment, requiring semantically related cross-language pairs to be closer in representation space than unrelated same-language pair. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for language-agnostic answer retrieval from a multilingual candidate pool that tests for "strong" cross-lingual alignment . they augment training data via machine translation and find that model performance is improved by augmenting training data through machine translation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on multilingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM-R. |
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer via Self-Learning with Uncertainty Estimation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance . we propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages to select silver labels for cross-lingual transfer tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two cross-lingual tasks by 10 F1 on average and 2.5 accuracy on natural language inference (NLI). |
Language Embeddings for Typology and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to leverage multilingual datasets highlight potential of multilingual models that can perform well across various languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate language representations that capture relationships among languages and evaluate them using WALS and two extrinsic tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be leveraged in cross-lingual tasks without parallel data . the proposed model is based on the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and two extrinsic tasks . |
KIT-Multi: A Translation-Oriented Multilingual Embedding Corpus (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual word embeddings are representations of words across languages in a shared continuous vector space. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual word embedding corpus which is acquired by neural machine translation and is based on monolingual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is competitive with existing methods but on the cross-lingual document classification task, it obtains the best figures. |
LexCLiPR: Cross-Lingual Paragraph Retrieval from Legal Judgments (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on IR focus on retrieving entire cases rather than precise, paragraph-level information. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual dataset for paragraph-level retrieval from ECtHR judgments . they evaluate retrieval models in a zero-shot setting and use multilingual case law guides . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels in cross-lingual retrieval, while siamese architectures are better suited for monolingual tasks. |
A Joint Matrix Factorization Analysis of Multilingual Representations (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that pre-trained models acquire and incorporate linguistic knowledge in their multilingual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool for comparing latent representations of multilingual and monolingual models . they use joint matrix factorization to analyze multiple sets of representations in a joint manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool analyzes latent representations of multilingual and monolingual models . it shows that language properties influence the factorization outputs . |
The Role of Mixed-Language Documents for Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining (2026.acl-long)
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Jiandong Shao, Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Karin Sevegnani, Pontus Stenetorp, Jianfei Yang, Yao Lu
| Challenge: | Existing research suggests that multilingual large language models can achieve impressive cross-lingual understanding despite largely monolingual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They compare a monolingual-only corpus with a standard web corpus that removes all multilingual documents and then retrain the models from scratch under controlled conditions. |
| Outcome: | The results show that removing bilingual data causes translation performance to drop 56% in BLEU, whereas code-switching contributes minimally. |