Zero-Compute Cross-Lingual Transferability Estimation Using Typological Feature Proxies

Abstract:Cross-lingual transfer describes how knowledge in a source language benefits a target language. Measuring it quantitatively requires broad multilingual pre-training, as prior work has done with cross-lingual transfer matrices. We ask whether transfer is predictable from freely available typological features, and whether the prominence of high-resource source languages reflects typology or data quality and quantity. We show that typological databases contain cheap and dense signals about cross-lingual transfer. Our typology-only random forest on a 24-language prior-work transfer matrix scores leave-one-language-out $\rho{=}0.705$ and $R^2{=}0.49$, beating a non-typological control at $\rho{=}0.62$, which verifies the ability of typology-only predictions to reconstruct costly measured cross-lingual transfer. The signal survives leave-one-script-out and leave-one-family-out protocols, so script and family confounding do not explain the effect. By decomposing the transfer into a typology term and a resource-and-script bias term, we find the best-source ranking sensitive to this bias. In contrast, typology is not affected by this bias, which makes it a zero-compute screening tool that replaces hundreds of training runs with a model fit. Our code is available \href{this https URL}{here}.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.39640 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.39640v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.39640 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.