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The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.
Low-resource languages remain challenging for machine translation, and Mongolian is a representative case. As a digraphic language, Mongolian is written in both Cyrillic and Traditional scripts, which exhibit a severe imbalance in data availability.
arXiv:2510. 07074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instruction tuning has become a key technique for enhancing the performance of large language models, enabling them to better follow human prompts.
arXiv:2607. 29355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer is central to low-resource machine translation, but its behavior within closely related language families remains insufficiently characterized.
arXiv:2510. 15551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus.