Typological Distance Effects on Cross-Lingual Euphemism Detection in Low-Resource Settings

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

How does typological distance between source and target languages impact cross-lingual transfer accuracy in low-resource euphemism detection using mBERT versus XLM-R?

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