mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Analyzing the Effect of Linguistic Similarity on Cross-Lingual Transfer: Tasks and Experimental Setups Matter

arXiv 2501.14491 ↗First posted 24 Jan 2025cs.CLcited by 10

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-lingual transfer is a popular approach to increase the amount of training data for NLP tasks in a low-resource context. However, the best strategy to decide which cross-lingual data to include is unclear. Prior research often focuses on a small set of languages from a few language families and/or a single task. It is still an open question how these findings extend to a wider variety of languages and tasks. In this work, we analyze cross-lingual transfer for 263 languages from a wide variety of language families. Moreover, we include three popular NLP tasks: POS tagging, dependency parsing, and topic classification. Our findings indicate that the effect of linguistic similarity on transfer performance depends on a range of factors: the NLP task, the (mono- or multilingual) input representations, and the definition of linguistic similarity.

Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2025.

Builds on

23 of 57 references.

References · 23

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,907
  3. 2019How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?cited by 642
  4. 2021The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 556
  5. 2023IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languagescited by 149
  6. 2023SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialectscited by 149
  7. 2019Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learningcited by 143
  8. 2020Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learningcited by 95
  9. 2023Towards a Common Understanding of Contributing Factors for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Language Models: A Reviewcited by 50
  10. 2020Predicting Performance for Natural Language Processing Taskscited by 49
  11. 2021Examining the Inductive Bias of Neural Language Models with Artificial Languagescited by 40
  12. 2020Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysiscited by 37
11 more
  1. 2022A Balanced Data Approach for Evaluating Cross-Lingual Transfer: Mapping the Linguistic Blood Bankcited by 29
  2. 2021Predicting the Performance of Multilingual NLP Modelscited by 24
  3. 2024URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Basecited by 21
  4. 2022Multi Task Learning For Zero Shot Performance Prediction of Multilingual Modelscited by 20
  5. 2018Global-scale phylogenetic linguistic inference from lexical resourcescited by 15
  6. 2023GlotScript: A Resource and Tool for Low Resource Writing System Identificationcited by 15
  7. 2024What Drives Performance in Multilingual Language Models?cited by 14
  8. 2022Languages You Know Influence Those You Learn: Impact of Language Characteristics on Multi-Lingual Text-to-Text Transfercited by 11
  9. 2023The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLPcited by 7
  10. 2024A Reproducibility Study on Quantifying Language Similarity: The Impact of Missing Values in the URIEL Knowledge Basecited by 7
  11. 2024data2lang2vec: Data Driven Typological Features Completioncited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 6.

10 papers.

  1. 2026The Roots of Performance Disparity in Multilingual Language Models: Intrinsic Modeling Difficulty or Design Choices?cited by 10
  2. 2025Modality Matching Matters: Calibrating Language Distances for Cross-Lingual Transfer in URIEL+cited by 3
  3. 2025Simple Additions, Substantial Gains: Expanding Scripts, Languages, and Lineage Coverage in URIEL+cited by 2
  4. 2026Multilingual Unlearning in LLMs: Transfer, Dynamics, and Reversibilitycited by 2
  5. 2025CultureMERT: Continual Pre-Training for Cross-Cultural Music Representation Learningcited by 1
  6. 2026Quantifying Cross-Lingual Transfer in Paralinguistic Speech Taskscited by 1
  7. 2025Multilingual BERT language model for medical tasks: Evaluation on domain-specific adaptation and cross-lingualitycited by 0
  8. 2026Dialects of Translationese Shape Language Model Learningcited by 0
  9. 2026Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inferencecited by 0
  10. 2026Language Distances are Practical for Equitable Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 0