arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

One Form to Transfer Them All: Pretraining Multilingual Language Models Beyond Native Orthography

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.

By Muge Zhang, Aaron Jencks, Krishna Badikela, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sachin Kumar
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

Sarashina2.2-TTS: Tackling Kanji Polyphony in Japanese Speech Generation via Data Scaling and Targeted Data Synthesis

While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

FormalASR: End-to-End Spoken Chinese to Formal Text

arXiv:2605. 19266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are typically optimized for verbatim transcription, which preserves disfluencies, filler words, and informal spoken structures that are often unsuitable for downstream writing-oriented applications.

By Wanyi Ning, Yinshang Guo, Haitao Qian, Jiyuan Cheng, Weiyuan Feng, Yufei Zhang