Universal or Language-Family-Specific Script Unification for Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Case Study on Turkic Languages
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Universal or Language-Family-Specific Script Unification for Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Case Study on Turkic Languages
Abstract:Closely related languages written in different scripts expose little surface overlap to multilingual models, limiting cross-lingual transfer. We compare two approaches to script unification: the general-purpose uroman romanizer and the family-specific Common Turkic Script (CTS). We train matched fastText models on transliterated Wikipedia corpora from 11 Turkic languages and evaluate them on WikiANN named entity recognition and Universal Dependencies part-of-speech tagging. CTS and uroman show no significant difference on NER, while both substantially outperform the official monolingual fastText baselines. POS results reveal no universal winner: language-specific differences are associated with the cross-lingual character n-gram coverage induced by each representation, while within-language coverage becomes more important when target-language supervision is available. Although CANINE-c achieves higher overall POS averages, the substantially simpler fastText-based systems remain competitive on several treebanks. Overall, the effectiveness of script unification depends on the language, the induced subword overlap, and the available supervision.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.09356 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.09356v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.09356
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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