How Transliterations Improve Crosslingual Alignment

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F26%3ATFB87XDD" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/26:TFB87XDD - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

How Transliterations Improve Crosslingual Alignment

Original language description

Recent studies have shown that post-aligning multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) using alignment objectives on both original and transliterated data can improve crosslingual alignment. This improvement further leads to better crosslingual transfer performance. However, it remains unclear how and why a better crosslingual alignment is achieved, as this technique only involves transliterations, and does not use any parallel data. This paper attempts to explicitly evaluate the crosslingual alignment and identify the key elements in transliteration-based approaches that contribute to better performance. For this, we train multiple models under varying setups for two pairs of related languages: (1) Polish and Ukrainian and (2) Hindi and Urdu. To assess alignment, we define four types of similarities based on sentence representations. Our experimental results show that adding transliterations alone improves the overall similarities, even for random sentence pairs. With the help of auxiliary transliteration-based alignment objectives, especially the contrastive objective, the model learns to distinguish matched from random pairs, leading to better crosslingual alignment. However, we also show that better alignment does not always yield better downstream performance, suggesting that further research is needed to clarify the connection between alignment and performance. The code implementation is based on https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA. © 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

Proc. Main Conf. Int. Conf. Comput. Linguist., COLING

ISBN

979-8-89176-196-4

ISSN

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e-ISSN

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Number of pages

17

Pages from-to

2417-2433

Publisher name

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Place of publication

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Event location

Abu Dhabi

Event date

Jan 1, 2026

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

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