Why Low-Resource NLP Needs More Than Cross-Lingual Transfer: Lessons Learned from Luxembourgish

Fred Philippy; Siwen Guo; Jacques Klein; Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

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arXiv · 2605.10714

Why Low-Resource NLP Needs More Than Cross-Lingual Transfer: Lessons Learned from Luxembourgish

Fred Philippy·Siwen Guo·Jacques Klein·Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

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Abstract

Cross-lingual transfer has become a central paradigm for extending natural language processing (NLP) technologies to low-resource languages. By leveraging supervision from high-resource languages, multilingual language models can achieve strong task performance with little or no labeled target-language data. However, it remains unclear to what extent cross-lingual transfer can substitute for language-specific efforts. In this paper, we synthesize prior research findings and data collection results on Luxembourgish, which, despite its typological proximity to high-resource languages and its presence in a multilingual context, remains insufficiently represented in modern NLP technologies. Across findings, we observe a fundamental interdependence between cross-lingual transfer and language-specific efforts. Cross-lingual transfer can substantially improve target-language performance, but its success depends critically on the availability of sufficiently high-quality, task-aligned target-language data. At the same time, such resources, particularly in low-resource settings, are typically too limited in scale to drive strong performance on their own. Instead, such resources reach their full potential only when leveraged within a cross-lingual framework. We therefore argue that cross-lingual transfer and language-specific efforts should not be viewed as competing alternatives. Instead, they function as complementary components of a sustainable low-resource NLP pipeline. Based on these insights, we provide practical guidelines for integrating and balancing cross-lingual transfer with language-specific development in sustainable low-resource NLP pipelines.

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Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé. 2026-05-11. Why Low-Resource NLP Needs More Than Cross-Lingual Transfer: Lessons Learned from Luxembourgish. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10714

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