arXiv · 2603.12021
Just Use XML: Revisiting Joint Translation and Label Projection
Abstract
Label projection is an effective technique for cross-lingual transfer, extending span-annotated datasets from a high-resource language to low-resource ones. Most approaches perform label projection as a separate step after machine translation, and prior work that combines the two reports degraded translation quality. We re-evaluate this claim with LabelPigeon, a novel framework that jointly performs translation and label projection via XML tags. We design a direct evaluation scheme for label projection, and find that LabelPigeon outperforms baselines and actively improves translation quality in 11 languages. We further assess translation quality across 203 languages and varying annotation complexity, finding consistent improvement attributed to additional fine-tuning. Finally, across 27 languages and three downstream tasks, we report substantial gains in cross-lingual transfer over comparable work, up to +40.2 F1 on NER. Overall, our results demonstrate that XML-tagged label projection provides effective and efficient label transfer without compromising translation quality.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Thennal DK, Chris Biemann, Hans Ole Hatzel. 2026-03-12. Just Use XML: Revisiting Joint Translation and Label Projection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12021
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.