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arXiv cs.CL
arXiv cs.CL
6/19/2026
Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer

Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer

Short summary

Researchers fine-tuned 7 LLMs on Arabic and found language family (Semitic vs. non-Semitic) doesn't significantly affect zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Both fine-tuning and chain-of-thought reasoning improve equally across all language families, suggesting task-format alignment drives gains rather than linguistic relatedness.

  • •Language family membership doesn't predict transfer performance
  • •Weak baselines improve universally; strong baselines show marginal gains regardless of target language
  • •Task-format alignment appears more important than cross-lingual knowledge transfer

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