Cognate and Contact-Induced Transfer Learning for Hamshentsnag: A Low-Resource and Endangered Language
Year: 2025

This study investigates zero-shot and few-shot cross-lingual transfer effects in Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Hamshentsnag, an endangered Western Armenian dialect.We examine how different source languages, Western Armenian (contact cognate), Eastern Armenian (ancestral cognate), Turkish (substrate or contactinduced), and English (non-cognate), affect the task performance using multilingual BERT and BERTurk.Results show that cognate varieties improved POS ta