Cross-Lingual Transfer for Machine Translation in Turkic Languages
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 targe...
| Authors | Omer Burak Cinar, Mehmet Mert Dalkilic, Cagri Toraman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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