Not Just a Piece of Cake: Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning for Idiom Identification

AbstractWe investigate cross-lingual fine-tuning for idiomatic expression identification, addressing the limited availability of annotated data in many languages. We evaluate encoder and generative decoder models to examine their ability to generalize idiom identification across languages. Additionally, we conduct an explainability study using linear probing and LogitLens to analyze how idiomatic meaning is represented across model layers. Results show consistent cross-lingual transfer, with English emerging as a strong source language. All code and models are released to support future research.