mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer language selection using linguistic similarity

arXiv 2301.13720 ↗First posted 31 Jan 2023cs.CLcited by 28

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Abstract (arXiv)

We study the selection of transfer languages for different Natural Language Processing tasks, specifically sentiment analysis, named entity recognition and dependency parsing. In order to select an optimal transfer language, we propose to utilize different linguistic similarity metrics to measure the distance between languages and make the choice of transfer language based on this information instead of relying on intuition. We demonstrate that linguistic similarity correlates with cross-lingual transfer performance for all of the proposed tasks. We also show that there is a statistically significant difference in choosing the optimal language as the transfer source instead of English. This allows us to select a more suitable transfer language which can be used to better leverage knowledge from high-resource languages in order to improve the performance of language applications lacking data. For the study, we used datasets from eight different languages from three language families.

Key facts. Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 95 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

Builds on

36 of 95 references.

References · 36

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24 more
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  15. 2017Learning Language Representations for Typology Predictioncited by 40
  16. 2019Entity Projection via Machine Translation for Cross-Lingual NERcited by 32
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  19. 2021Multilingual and cross-lingual document classification: A meta-learning approachcited by 14
  20. 2019Towards Lingua Franca Named Entity Recognition with BERTcited by 11
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  24. 2021Improving Classifier Training Efficiency for Automatic Cyberbullying Detection with Feature Densitycited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 6; 2024: 7; 2025: 5; 2026: 10.

28 papers.

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  1. 2024LLaMA Beyond English: An Empirical Study on Language Capability Transfercited by 95
  2. 2023Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysiscited by 35
  3. 2023Quantifying the Dialect Gap and its Correlates Across Languagescited by 33
  4. 2023When Is Multilinguality a Curse? Language Modeling for 250 High- and Low-Resource Languagescited by 32
  5. 2024Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languagescited by 29
  6. 2023Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Modelscited by 16
  7. 2024Breaking Language Barriers: Cross-Lingual Continual Pre-Training at Scalecited by 15
  8. 2024Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learnerscited by 11
  9. 2025Untangling the Influence of Typology, Data and Model Architecture on Ranking Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual POS Taggingcited by 9
  10. 2023Cyberbullying Detection for Low-resource Languages and Dialects: Review of the State of the Artcited by 8
  11. 2025How Does Alignment Enhance LLMs' Multilingual Capabilities? A Language Neurons Perspectivecited by 8
  12. 2025FilBench: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Filipino?cited by 3
16 more
  1. 2025Modality Matching Matters: Calibrating Language Distances for Cross-Lingual Transfer in URIEL+cited by 3
  2. 2024Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language Story Understandingcited by 2
  3. 2026PortBERT: Navigating the Depths of Portuguese Language Modelscited by 2
  4. 2023Improving Polish to English Neural Machine Translation with Transfer Learning: Effects of Data Volume and Language Similaritycited by 1
  5. 2024LegalTurk Optimized BERT for Multi-Label Text Classification and NERcited by 1
  6. 2024Locally Measuring Cross-lingual Lexical Alignment: A Domain and Word Level Perspectivecited by 1
  7. 2026From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Modelscited by 1
  8. 2026Sequential Adapter Stacking for Cross-Lingual Low-Resource ASRcited by 1
  9. 2025Can MLLMs Generalize to Multi-Party dialog? Exploring Multilingual Response Generation in Complex Scenarioscited by 0
  10. 2026Using Machine Learning to Enhance the Detection of Obfuscated Abusive Words in Swahili: A Focus on Child Safetycited by 0
  11. 2026Budget-Xfer: Budget-Constrained Source Language Selection for Cross-Lingual Transfer to African Languagescited by 0
  12. 2026Harnessing Linguistic Dissimilarity for Language Generalization on Unseen Low-Resource Varietiescited by 0
  13. 2026Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 0
  14. 2026Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 0
  15. 2026Language Distances are Practical for Equitable Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 0
  16. 2026RunyaNER: Auxiliary Language Selection for Runyankore NERcited by 0