{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/soft-language-prompts-for-language-transfer","title":"Soft Language Prompts for Language Transfer","arxiv_id":"2407.02317","date":"2024-07-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ivan Vykopal","Simon Ostermann","Marián Šimko"],"abstract":"Cross-lingual knowledge transfer, especially between high- and low-resource languages, remains challenging in natural language processing (NLP). This study offers insights for improving cross-lingual NLP applications through the combination of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. We systematically explore strategies for enhancing cross-lingual transfer through the incorporation of language-specific and task-specific adapters and soft prompts. We present a detailed investigation of various combinations of these methods, exploring their efficiency across 16 languages, focusing on 10 mid- and low-resource languages. We further present to our knowledge the first use of soft prompts for language transfer, a technique we call soft language prompts. Our findings demonstrate that in contrast to claims of previous work, a combination of language and task adapters does not always work best; instead, combining a soft language prompt with a task adapter outperforms most configurations in many cases.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02317v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02317v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"soft-language-prompts-for-language-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/ivanvykopal/adapter-prompt-evaluation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"soft-language-prompts-for-language-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/kinit-sk/adapter-prompt-evaluation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-lingual-transfer","task_name":"Cross-Lingual Transfer"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"},{"task_slug":"parameter-efficient-fine-tuning","task_name":"parameter-efficient fine-tuning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adapter","method_name":"Adapter"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}