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When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

paperactiveprovisionalwhen-english-isn-t-the-best-teacher-source-language-effects-in-cross-lingual-in-context-learning-60020e86·1 events·first seen 4h ago

Aliases: When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

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4arXiv · cs.CL·4h ago·source ↗

Cross-lingual in-context learning source language selection challenges fine-tuning assumptions

A new arXiv paper conducts a broad empirical study of cross-lingual transfer in few-shot in-context learning (ICL), spanning seven tasks, six models, and a typologically diverse set of languages. The study finds that conventional heuristics from supervised fine-tuning — such as relying on linguistic similarity or data availability — do not consistently transfer to the ICL regime. The authors also analyze language confusion as a key obstacle in generative cross-lingual ICL and propose alternative heuristics for source language selection.