The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.
By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv:2608.03446v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform better on non-English classification tasks when the representations of the giv...
By Adnan Al Ali, Kathy H\"ammerl, Jind\v{r}ich Libovick\'y, Alexander Fraser
The paper challenges the assumption that improving cross‑lingual alignment automatically enhances cross‑lingual transfer. Using XLM‑R models aligned on token, sentence, and masked‑language‑modeling objectives across four language pairs, the authors evaluate zero‑shot transfer on part‑of‑speech tagging and sentence classification. They find that embedding‑based alignment metrics poorly predict downstream performance and that alignment and task gradients are often nearly orthogonal, especially when operating at different representational levels.
By Yana Veitsman, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Sch\"utze
arXiv:2609.37543v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Cross-lingual zero-shot transfer and multilingual fine-tuning are promising approaches for NLP tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) in low-reso...
By Prosper Arineitwe Asiimwe, Francois Meyer, Jan Buys
arXiv:2510. 15551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus.
By Vihari Piratla, Purvam Jain, Darshan Singh, Trevor Cohn, Preethi Jyothi, Partha Talukdar
The paper explores structural transfer, where models are first trained on non-language data such as music, probabilistic grammars, and cellular automata to induce priors for natural language tasks. This pretraining acts as a weight initialization for multilingual language modeling and leads to lower next-token prediction loss and smaller weight shifts during subsequent language training. However, the improved loss does not consistently translate into better downstream linguistic performance, and the efficiency of non-language data is lower than that of additional language data.
By Yana Veitsman, Jonas Mayer Martins, Jonathan Lautenschlager, Lisa Beinborn
arXiv:2607.00171v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Text embeddings are standard for semantic similarity tasks, yet their evaluation remains an open challenge. Current benchmarks are static, cover on...
By Andrianos Michail, Stylianos Psychias, Michelle Wastl, Simon Clematide, Rico Sennrich, Juri Opitz
arXiv:2607. 19243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual fluency, their internal knowledge representations remain disproportionately biased toward high-resource languages.
By Alexander Manev
The paper introduces Loci Similes, a benchmark for detecting intertextual links in Latin literature. It provides a curated dataset of about 176,000 text segments and 1,490 expert-verified parallels, including 945 labeled references from an existing source. Baselines for retrieval and classification are established using both lexical methods and pretrained encoder language models.
By Julian Schelb, Michael Wittweiler, Marie Revellio, Barbara Feichtinger, Andreas Spitz
The paper investigates whether language models can transfer hierarchical syntactic knowledge from a source language (L1) to a target language (L2) using a novel cross‑lingual poverty‑of‑stimulus (CPOS) experimental design. Results show that models can partially transfer L1 structural evidence to L2, producing a small but detectable hierarchical bias that varies across language pairs. The study further demonstrates that vocabulary overlap is crucial for successful transfer, indicating that cross‑lingual learning of hierarchical generalization is conditionally achievable.
By Shin Yamaguchi, Masaya Taniguchi, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Taro Watanabe, Yoshinobu Kano
arXiv:2606. 18033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality.
By Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
arXiv:2605. 31220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Confidence estimation (CE), i.
By Athina Kyriakou, Dennis Ulmer, Ivan Titov