Multilinguality Does not Make Sense: Investigating Factors Behind Zero-Shot Transfer in Sense-Aware Tasks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24834v2
• Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:23:18 GMT
• Title: Multilinguality Does not Make Sense: Investigating Factors Behind Zero-Shot Transfer in Sense-Aware Tasks
• Authors: Roksana Goworek, Haim Dubossarsky,
• Abstract summary: Cross-lingual transfer is central to modern NLP, enabling models to perform tasks in languages different from those they were trained on.<n>A common assumption is that training on more languages improves zero-shot transfer.<n>We test this on sense-aware tasks-polysemy and lexical semantic change-and find that multilinguality is not necessary for effective transfer.
• Score: 3.274367403737527
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer is central to modern NLP, enabling models to perform tasks in languages different from those they were trained on. A common assumption is that training on more languages improves zero-shot transfer. We test this on sense-aware tasks-polysemy and lexical semantic change-and find that multilinguality is not necessary for effective transfer. Our large-scale analysis across 28 languages reveals that other factors, such as differences in pretraining and fine-tuning data and evaluation artifacts, better explain the perceived benefits of multilinguality. We also release fine-tuned models and provide empirical baselines to support future research. While focused on two sense-aware tasks, our findings offer broader insights into cross-lingual transfer, especially for low-resource languages.

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