Comparative Effects of Intermediate-Task Fine-Tuning on Cross-Lingual Alignment Metrics for Under-Represented Languages

Abstract

Abstract: Euphemisms are culturally variable and often ambiguous, posing challenges for language models, especially in low-resource settings. This paper investigates how cross-lingual transfer via sequential fine-tuning affects euphemism detection across five languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, and Yoruba. We compare sequential fine-tuning with monolingual and simultaneous fine-tuning using XLM-R and mBERT, analyzing how performance is shaped by language pairings, typological features, and pretraining coverage. Results show that sequential fine-tuning with a high-resource L1 improves L2 perfo

Research Question

What is the comparative effect of English intermediate-task fine-tuning versus direct target-language fine-tuning on alignment metrics for under-represented languages in cross-lingual transfer scenarios?

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