arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Improving Cross-Lingual Token Representations by Adding a Pinch of SALT

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2609.09953 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Sep 2026]

Title:Improving Cross-Lingual Token Representations by Adding a Pinch of SALT

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Abstract:Cross-lingual sentence encoders enable scalable transfer across hundreds of languages, powering applications such as translation mining and zero-shot learning in low-resource settings. Although trained for sentence-level alignment, they are increasingly also applied to token-level tasks such as hallucination detection and sequence tagging, exposing a mismatch between training and usage. We propose SALT, a lightweight post-training method that improves token representations by injecting span-level supervision into existing sentence encoders. Across five multilingual token-level benchmarks, SALT achieves the best overall results on four of them, outperforming alternative fine-tuning strategies and competitive encoders. It also improves sentence-level performance on cross-lingual retrieval and classification tasks. These results demonstrate that span-level supervision is an effective signal for improving both token and sentence representations.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.09953 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2609.09953v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09953
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Guillem Ramírez [view email]
[v1] Wed, 9 Sep 2026 09:43:41 UTC (487 KB)
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