Model-Based Ranking of Source Languages for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ebrahimi, Abteen, Wiemerslage, Adam, von der Wense, Katharina
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Ebrahimi, Abteen
Wiemerslage, Adam
von der Wense, Katharina
author_facet Ebrahimi, Abteen
Wiemerslage, Adam
von der Wense, Katharina
contents We present NN-Rank, an algorithm for ranking source languages for cross-lingual transfer, which leverages hidden representations from multilingual models and unlabeled target-language data. We experiment with two pretrained multilingual models and two tasks: part-of-speech tagging (POS) and named entity recognition (NER). We consider 51 source languages and evaluate on 56 and 72 target languages for POS and NER, respectively. When using in-domain data, NN-Rank beats state-of-the-art baselines that leverage lexical and linguistic features, with average improvements of up to 35.56 NDCG for POS and 18.14 NDCG for NER. As prior approaches can fall back to language-level features if target language data is not available, we show that NN-Rank remains competitive using only the Bible, an out-of-domain corpus available for a large number of languages. Ablations on the amount of unlabeled target data show that, for subsets consisting of as few as 25 examples, NN-Rank produces high-quality rankings which achieve 92.8% of the NDCG achieved using all available target data for ranking.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03202
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model-Based Ranking of Source Languages for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer
Ebrahimi, Abteen
Wiemerslage, Adam
von der Wense, Katharina
Computation and Language
We present NN-Rank, an algorithm for ranking source languages for cross-lingual transfer, which leverages hidden representations from multilingual models and unlabeled target-language data. We experiment with two pretrained multilingual models and two tasks: part-of-speech tagging (POS) and named entity recognition (NER). We consider 51 source languages and evaluate on 56 and 72 target languages for POS and NER, respectively. When using in-domain data, NN-Rank beats state-of-the-art baselines that leverage lexical and linguistic features, with average improvements of up to 35.56 NDCG for POS and 18.14 NDCG for NER. As prior approaches can fall back to language-level features if target language data is not available, we show that NN-Rank remains competitive using only the Bible, an out-of-domain corpus available for a large number of languages. Ablations on the amount of unlabeled target data show that, for subsets consisting of as few as 25 examples, NN-Rank produces high-quality rankings which achieve 92.8% of the NDCG achieved using all available target data for ranking.
title Model-Based Ranking of Source Languages for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03202