@inproceedings{maji-bhattacharya-2025-bhashasetu,
    title = "{B}hasha{S}etu: Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer from High-Resource to Extreme Low-Resource Languages",
    author = "Maji, Subhadip  and
      Bhattacharya, Arnab",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.115/",
    pages = "2111--2129",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-298-5",
    abstract = "Despite remarkable advances in natural language processing, developing effective systems for low-resource languages remains a formidable challenge, with performances typically lagging far behind high-resource counterparts due to data scarcity and insufficient linguistic resources. Cross-lingual knowledge transfer has emerged as a promising approach to address this challenge by leveraging resources from high-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate methods for transferring linguistic knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages, where the number of labeled training instances is in hundreds. We focus on sentence-level and word-level tasks. We introduce a novel method, GETR (Graph-Enhanced Token Representation) for cross-lingual knowledge transfer along with two adopted baselines (a) augmentation in hidden layers and (b) token embedding transfer through token translation. Experimental results demonstrate that our GNN-based approach significantly outperforms existing multilingual and cross-lingual baseline methods, achieving 13 percentage point improvements on truly low-resource languages (Mizo, Khasi) for POS tagging, and 20 and 27 percentage point improvements in macro-F1 on simulated low-resource languages (Marathi, Bangla, Malayalam) across sentiment classification and NER tasks respectively. We also present a detailed analysis of the transfer mechanisms and identify key factors that contribute to successful knowledge transfer in this linguistic context."
}