Impact of Script Divergence on Cross-Lingual Retrieval Failure of mDPR for Amharic

Abstract

Abstract: Although multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable performance across benchmarks, we find they continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages across contemporary LLM families. This discrepancy arises from the fact that LLMs are pretrained with orthographic scripts, which are dominated by Latin characters that obscure their shared phonology with non-Latin scripts. We propose leveraging phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations. Our study demonstrates that integrating phonemic signals improves performance across both non-Latin and Latin

Research Question

What is the impact of script divergence on the cross-lingual retrieval failure of mDPR for Amharic, as measured by the performance gap in Recall@K between Latin-script and non-Latin-script low-resource languages?

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