@inproceedings{biyik-etal-2026-semantic,
    title = "When Semantic Overlap Is Not Enough: Cross-Lingual Euphemism Transfer Between {T}urkish and {E}nglish",
    author = "Biyik, Hasan Can  and
      Barak, Libby  and
      Peng, Jing  and
      Feldman, Anna",
    editor = {Oflazer, Kemal  and
      K{\"o}ksal, Abdullatif  and
      Varol, Onur},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for {T}urkic Languages ({SIGTURK} 2026)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.sigturk-1.11/",
    pages = "113--125",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-370-8",
    abstract = "Euphemisms substitute socially sensitive expressions, often softening or reframing meaning, and their reliance on cultural and pragmatic context complicates modeling across languages. In this study, we investigate how cross-lingual equivalence influences transfer in multilingual euphemism detection. We categorize Potentially Euphemistic Terms (PETs) in Turkish and English into Overlapping (OPETs) and Non-Overlapping (NOPETs) subsets based on their functional, pragmatic, and semantic alignment. Our findings reveal a transfer asymmetry: semantic overlap is insufficient to guarantee positive transfer, particularly in low-resource Turkish-to-English direction, where performance can degrade even for overlapping euphemisms, and in some cases, improve under NOPET-based training. Differences in label distribution help explain these counterintuitive results. Category-level analysis suggests that transfer may be influenced by domain-specific alignment, though evidence is limited by sparsity."
}