CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-07-31

Cross-Lingual Transfer for Machine Translation in Turkic Languages

Omer Burak Cinar, Mehmet Mert Dalkilic, Cagri Toraman

Cross-lingual transfer is central to low-resource machine translation, but its behavior within closely related language families remains insufficiently characterized. We study transfer among five Turkic languages; Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz; using pairwise transfer matrices. In this setting, each model is fine-tuned with one transfer source and evaluated on a different transfer target while the translation target remains the same. Across mT5 experiments, we find that transfer is strongest between closely related Turkic pairs, especially Turkish-Azerbaijani and Kazakh-Kyrgyz. We also show that transfer direction matters, and that the same transfer source-transfer target pair can behave differently when the translation target changes. Latinization improves BLEU and chrF in several script-mismatched settings, but its effect is not uniform across metrics. Additional analyses show that transfer sources are mostly stable across different datasets and model settings.

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-07-22

Language-Specific versus Cross-Lingual Knowledge Graphs for Implicit Aspect Identification in Arabic: A Comparative Study of Reasoning and Adaptation Strategies

Lujain A. Alawwad

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in Arabic must recover both explicitly stated aspects and implicit aspects that are never named in the text. Implicit identification typically relies on an auxiliary knowledge source (e.g., a knowledge graph (KG)) linking opinion cues to asp…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-07-06

Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, et al.

Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale. A promising direction is to leverage linguistic relatedness to enhance cross-lingual transfer from a related auxiliary language to…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-06-30

Cross-lingual Relation Extraction with Large Language Models: Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, and Fine-Tuned Evaluation on Romanian

Dragos-Mitrut Vasile, Elena-Simona Apostol, Stefan-Adrian Toma, Adrian Paschke, Ciprian-Octavian Truica

Relation extraction (RE) for low-resource languages is typically constrained by the lack of annotated corpora. We investigate the feasibility of cross-lingual RE for Romanian by combining automatic dataset translation with large language model (LLM) inference. We translate the Se…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CLcs.AIcs.LG2026-07-21

Reasoning Before Translation: Enhancing Legal Machine Translation with Structured Reasoning

Aixiu An, Michael Jungo, Eloi Eynard, Mark Drenhaus, Andreas Fischer, Jean Hennebert, et al.

Neural machine translation (NMT) in the legal domain is a linguistically and conceptually demanding task, primarily due to the complexity of legal language and the high level of precision it requires. The recent emergence of reasoning-capable language models opens new possibiliti…

View free PDFSource page