The Latin Substrate: How Language Models Represent and Mediate Script Choice
Many languages are written in multiple scripts, requiring large language models (LLMs) to generate equivalent linguistic content in distinct orthographic forms. While prior work suggests that LLMs route information through shared latent representations, how they internally mediate script variation remains poorly understood. We study this question by first examining per-layer output distributions with the logit lens, which reveals consistent latent romanization during transliteration, and then through representational and mechanistic analyses of script generation. At the representational level, we show that scripts of the same language become increasingly separable across layers and that a...
| Authors | Daniil Gurgurov, Alan Saji, Katharina Trinley et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.