Not Just a Piece of Cake: Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning for Idiom Identification

Ofri Hefetz, Kai Golan Hashiloni, Alon Mannor, Kfir Bar


Abstract
We investigate cross-lingual fine-tuning for idiomatic expression identification, addressing the limited availability of annotated data in many languages. We evaluate encoder and generative decoder models to examine their ability to generalize idiom identification across languages. Additionally, we conduct an explainability study using linear probing and LogitLens to analyze how idiomatic meaning is represented across model layers. Results show consistent cross-lingual transfer, with English emerging as a strong source language. All code and models are released to support future research.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.136
Volume:
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:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2521–2537
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.136/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ofri Hefetz, Kai Golan Hashiloni, Alon Mannor, and Kfir Bar. 2025. Not Just a Piece of Cake: Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning for Idiom Identification. In 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, pages 2521–2537, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Not Just a Piece of Cake: Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning for Idiom Identification (Hefetz et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.136.pdf