Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual Transfer
<|reference_start|>Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual Transfer: Cross-lingual transfer has become an effective way of transferring knowledge between languages. In this paper, we explore an often overlooked aspect in this domain: the influence of the source language of a language model on language transfer performance. We consider a case where the target language and its script are not part of the pre-trained model. We conduct a series of experiments on monolingual and multilingual models that are pre-trained on different tokenization methods to determine factors that affect cross-lingual transfer to a new language with a unique script. Our findings reveal the importance of the tokenizer as a stronger factor than the shared script, language similarity, and model size.<|reference_end|>
@article{tufa2024unknown,
    title={Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual Transfer},
    author={Wondimagegnhue Tsegaye Tufa, Ilia Markov, Piek Vossen},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.18810},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.18810},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}