Outstanding Paper Award at EACL 2024 for Hinrich Schütze and Lütfi Kerem Senel

Cross-lingual transfer (XLT) driven by massively multilingual language models (mmLMs) has been shown largely ineffective for low-resource (LR) target languages with little (or no) representation in mmLM’s pretraining, especially if they are linguistically distant from the high-resource (HR) source language. Much of the recent focus in XLT research has been dedicated to LR language families, i.e., families without any HR languages (e.g., families of African languages or indigenous languages of the Americas). In this work, in contrast, we investigate a configuration that is arguably of practical relevance for more of the world’s languages: XLT to LR languages that do have a close HR relative. To explore the extent to which a HR language can facilitate transfer to its LR relatives, we (1) introduce Kardeş-NLU, an evaluation benchmark with language understanding datasets in five LR Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Uyghur; and (2) investigate (a) intermediate training and (b) fine-tuning strategies that leverage Turkish in XLT to these target languages. Our experimental results show that both - integrating Turkish in intermediate training and in downstream fine-tuning - yield substantial improvements in XLT to LR Turkic languages. Finally, we benchmark cutting-edge instruction-tuned large language models on Kardeş-NLU, showing that their performance is highly task- and language-dependent.