# A Survey on Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04239 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04239/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Head2Toe: Utilizing Intermediate Representations for Better Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03529/) (2022)
- [Deep Transfer Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition: Towards Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14535/) (2023)
- [Position: Key Claims in LLM Research Have a Long Tail of Footnotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07120/) (2023)
- [Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection in Bengali](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03479/) (2022)
- [Privacy enabled Financial Text Classification using Differential Privacy and Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01643/) (2021)
- [Towards energy-efficient Deep Learning: An overview of energy-efficient approaches along the Deep Learning Lifecycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01980/) (2023)
- [Guiding The Last Layer in Federated Learning with Pre-Trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03937/) (2023)
- [A Recent Survey of Heterogeneous Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08459/) (2023)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Clinical Text: An Empirical Investigation into Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models and Transfer-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07250/) (2023)
- [NLP for The Greek Language: A Longer Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10962/) (2024)
- [SPARQL Generation with Entity Pre-trained GPT for KG Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00969/) (2024)
- [Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI through Neuro-Symbolic Architectures: Benefits and Limitations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11269/) (2025)
- [Transfer Learning for Individual Treatment Effect Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00380/) (2022)
- [Exploring Tokenization Strategies and Vocabulary Sizes for Enhanced Arabic Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11130/) (2024)
- [Towards the Fundamental Limits of Knowledge Transfer over Finite Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07838/) (2023)
- [How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04775/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Environmental Science: A Survey of Emerging Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04280/) (2025)
- [Deception detection in text and its relation to the cultural dimension of individualism/collectivism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12530/) (2021)
- [Neuroplasticity in Artificial Intelligence -- An Overview and Inspirations on Drop In & Out Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21419/) (2025)
- [Literature review on vulnerability detection using NLP technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11230/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Prompt Learning for Product Title Generation with Extremely Limited Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01969/) (2023)
- [An Introduction to Natural Language Processing Techniques and Framework for Clinical Implementation in Radiation Oncology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02205/) (2023)
- [FAQ-Gen: An automated system to generate domain-specific FAQs to aid content comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05812/) (2024)
- [Transfer Learning with Clinical Concept Embeddings from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13893/) (2024)
- [Punctuation Restoration in Spanish Customer Support Transcripts using Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13961/) (2022)
- [Online Transfer Learning for RSV Case Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01987/) (2024)
- [LEKA:LLM-Enhanced Knowledge Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17802/) (2025)
- [Crude Oil-related Events Extraction and Processing: A Transfer Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00387/) (2022)
- [Natural Language Processing Through Transfer Learning: A Case Study on Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16965/) (2023)
- [Poem Meter Classification of Recited Arabic Poetry: Integrating High-Resource Systems for a Low-Resource Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12172/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning models usually require a huge amount of data. However, these large datasets are not always attainable. This is common in many challenging NLP tasks. Consider Neural Machine Translation, for instance, where curating such large datasets may not be possible specially for low resource languages. Another limitation of deep learning models is the demand for huge computing resources. These obstacles motivate research to question the possibility of knowledge transfer using large trained models. The demand for transfer learning is increasing as many large models are emerging. In this survey, we feature the recent transfer learning advances in the field of NLP. We also provide a taxonomy for categorizing different transfer learning approaches from the literature.
