Quantifying Cross-Lingual Transfer in Paralinguistic Speech Tasks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08231v1
• Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:02:57 GMT
• Title: Quantifying Cross-Lingual Transfer in Paralinguistic Speech Tasks
• Abstract summary: We introduce the Cross-Lingual Transfer Matrix (CLTM), a systematic method to quantify cross-lingual interactions between languages.<n>We apply the CLTM to two paralinguistic tasks, gender identification and speaker verification, using a multilingual HuBERT-based encoder.<n>Our results reveal distinct transfer patterns across tasks and languages, reflecting systematic, language-dependent effects.
• Score: 4.911970211082446
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Paralinguistic speech tasks are often considered relatively language-agnostic, as they rely on extralinguistic acoustic cues rather than lexical content. However, prior studies report performance degradation under cross-lingual conditions, indicating non-negligible language dependence. Still, these studies typically focus on isolated language pairs or task-specific settings, limiting comparability and preventing a systematic assessment of task-level language dependence. We introduce the Cross-Lingual Transfer Matrix (CLTM), a systematic method to quantify cross-lingual interactions between pairs of languages within a given task. We apply the CLTM to two paralinguistic tasks, gender identification and speaker verification, using a multilingual HuBERT-based encoder, to analyze how donor-language data affects target-language performance during fine-tuning. Our results reveal distinct transfer patterns across tasks and languages, reflecting systematic, language-dependent effects.

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