Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer
Study of cross-lingual transfer in LLMs finds no evidence that linguistic relatedness improves zero-shot performance.
We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B--671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. Across dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, we find no evidence of Semitic-specific transfer: models with weak baselines improve dramatically across all languages, while strong-baseline models show only marginal…
