Papers by Lennart Keller
One Script Instead of Hundreds? On Pretraining Romanized Encoder Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on setups that favor romanization for cross-lingual transfer . a fidelity-based approach is needed to improve performance for high-resource languages . |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain LMs from scratch on romanized and original texts for six languages . they find that romanization improves encoding efficiency for segmental scripts at a negligible cost . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the loss of script-specific information and dilution of language-specific representations from increased subword overlap. |