Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot and few-shot tasks, but achieving similar performance with encoder-only models like BERT and RoBERTa has been challenging due to their architecture. However, encoders offer advantages such as lower computational and memory costs. Recent work adapts them for zero-shot generalization using Statement Tuning, which reformulates tasks into finite templates. We extend this approach to multilingual NLP, exploring whether encoders can achieve zero-shot cross-lingual generalization and serve as efficient alternatives to memory-intensive LLMs for low-resource languages. Our results show that state-of-the-art encoder models generalize well across languages, rivaling multilingual LLMs while being more efficient. We also analyze multilingual Statement Tuning dataset design, efficiency gains, and language-specific generalization, contributing to more inclusive and resource-efficient NLP models. We release our code and models.

Multilingual code-switching research is often hindered by the lack and linguistically biased status of available datasets. To expand language representation, we synthesize code-switching data by replacing intonation units detected through PSST, a speech segmentation model fine-tuned from OpenAI’s Whisper, using a speech-to-text translation dataset, CoVoST 2. With our dataset, CoVoSwitch, spanning 13 languages, we evaluate the code-switching translation performance of two multilingual translation models, M2M-100 418M and NLLB-200 600M. We reveal that the inclusion of code-switching units results in higher translation performance than monolingual settings and that models are better at code-switching translation into English than non-English. Further, low-resource languages gain most from integration of code-switched units when translating into English but much less when translating into non-English. Translations into low-resource languages also perform worse than even raw code-switched inputs. We find that systems excel at copying English tokens but struggle with non-English tokens, that the off-target problem in monolingual settings is also relevant in code-switching settings, and that models hallucinate in code-switching translation by introducing words absent in both of the original source sentences. CoVoSwitch and code are available at https://github.com/sophiayk20/covoswitch.