Universal or Language-Family-Specific Script Unification for Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Case Study on Turkic Languages
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 associate...
| Authors | Zijie Zhang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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