Hannah Haynie
2025
Untangling the Influence of Typology, Data, and Model Architecture on Ranking Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual POS Tagging
Enora Rice
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Ali Marashian
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Hannah Haynie
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Katharina Wense
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Alexis Palmer
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Language Models for Underserved Communities (LM4UC 2025)
Cross-lingual transfer learning is an invaluable tool for overcoming data scarcity, yet selecting a suitable transfer language remains a challenge. The precise roles of linguistic typology, training data, and model architecture in transfer language choice are not fully understood. We take a holistic approach, examining how both dataset-specific and fine-grained typological features influence transfer language selection for part-of-speech tagging, considering two different sources for morphosyntactic features. While previous work examines these dynamics in the context of bilingual biLSTMS, we extend our analysis to a more modern transfer learning pipeline: zero-shot prediction with pretrained multilingual models. We train a series of transfer language ranking systems and examine how different feature inputs influence ranker performance across architectures. Word overlap, type-token ratio, and genealogical distance emerge as top features across all architectures. Our findings reveal that a combination of typological and dataset-dependent features leads to the best rankings, and that good performance can be obtained with either feature group on its own.