mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Can Embedding Similarity Predict Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Systematic Study on African Languages

arXiv 2601.03168 ↗First posted 6 Jan 2026cs.CL cs.LGcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-lingual transfer is essential for building NLP systems for low-resource African languages, but practitioners lack reliable methods for selecting source languages. We systematically evaluate five embedding similarity metrics across 816 transfer experiments spanning three NLP tasks, three African-centric multilingual models, and 12 languages from four language families. We find that cosine gap and retrieval-based metrics (P@1, CSLS) reliably predict transfer success (ρ = 0.4-0.6), while CKA shows negligible predictive power (ρ ≈ 0.1). Critically, correlation signs reverse when pooling across models (Simpson's Paradox), so practitioners must validate per-model. Embedding metrics achieve comparable predictive power to URIEL linguistic typology. Our results provide concrete guidance for source language selection and highlight the importance of model-specific analysis.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 31 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2026.

Builds on

31 of 40 references.

References · 31

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,935
  3. 2021SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddingscited by 2,173
  4. 2019Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisitedcited by 1,755
  5. 2018XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representationscited by 915
  6. 2019How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddingscited by 784
  7. 2019How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?cited by 645
  8. 2017Word Translation Without Parallel Datacited by 487
  9. 2018Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyondcited by 434
  10. 2020On the Stability of Fine-tuning BERT: Misconceptions, Explanations, and Strong Baselinescited by 255
  11. 2019Emerging Cross-lingual Structure in Pretrained Language Modelscited by 181
  12. 2021MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languagescited by 155
19 more
  1. 2022Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuningcited by 149
  2. 2019Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learningcited by 144
  3. 2022A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translationcited by 98
  4. 2023AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languagescited by 68
  5. 2021First Align, then Predict: Understanding the Cross-Lingual Ability of Multilingual BERTcited by 65
  6. 2020Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languagescited by 52
  7. 2021Revisiting the Primacy of English in Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfercited by 47
  8. 2022SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africacited by 40
  9. 2024Probing the Emergence of Cross-lingual Alignment during LLM Trainingcited by 39
  10. 2020From Zero to Hero: On the Limitations of Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Multilingual Transformerscited by 35
  11. 2021A Cluster-based Approach for Improving Isotropy in Contextual Embedding Spacecited by 27
  12. 2024MEXA: Multilingual Evaluation of English-Centric LLMs via Cross-Lingual Alignmentcited by 25
  13. 2023MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languagescited by 23
  14. 2021Evaluating Multilingual Text Encoders for Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Retrievalcited by 16
  15. 2025Can you map it to English? The Role of Cross-Lingual Alignment in Multilingual Performance of LLMscited by 12
  16. 2022Languages You Know Influence Those You Learn: Impact of Language Characteristics on Multi-Lingual Text-to-Text Transfercited by 11
  17. 2025Untangling the Influence of Typology, Data and Model Architecture on Ranking Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual POS Taggingcited by 9
  18. 2022Cross-lingual Similarity of Multilingual Representations Revisitedcited by 8
  19. 2023A Joint Matrix Factorization Analysis of Multilingual Representationscited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

  1. 2026A Cost-Efficient Routing Pipeline for Multilingual Short-Text Classification Using Small Language Modelscited by 1
  2. 2026Sequential Adapter Stacking for Cross-Lingual Low-Resource ASRcited by 1
  3. 2026Budget-Xfer: Budget-Constrained Source Language Selection for Cross-Lingual Transfer to African Languagescited by 0