Budget-Xfer Framework for Cross-Lingual NER Accuracy in Low-Resource African Languages

Abstract

Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer learning enables NLP for low-resource languages by leveraging labeled data from higher-resource sources, yet existing comparisons of source language selection strategies do not control for total training data, confounding language selection effects with data quantity effects. We introduce Budget-Xfer, a framework that formulates multi-source cross-lingual transfer as a budget-constrained resource allocation problem. Given a fixed annotation budget B, our framework jointly optimizes which source languages to include and how much data to allocate from each. We evaluate fou

Research Question

Does the Budget-Xfer framework improve cross-lingual NER accuracy on low-resource African languages compared to single-source transfer when using a fixed annotation budget of 100k tokens?

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