Language Distances are Practical for Equitable Cross-Lingual Transfer
Cross-lingual transfer is strongly conditional on how the source language is chosen, but it is impractical to determine the best candidate source for every target language, especially for low-resource target languages. Language distances are widely used to rank candidate sources due to their correlation with transfer efficacy and applicability in resource-sparse settings. However, the reliability of distance-based rankers across tasks and resource levels remains underexplored. We therefore present the first equity-focused evaluation of paradigms for ranking source languages, studying resource-level inequality and task inequality across ten cross-lingual tasks and two multilingual models. ...
| Authors | York Hay Ng, Razan Ahsan Rifandi, Aditya Khan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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