CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration -- A step towards Cross-lingual Transfer Beyond Textual Scripts
<|reference_start|>CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration -- A step towards Cross-lingual Transfer Beyond Textual Scripts: Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer for many languages by failing to consider the importance of language contact. Some languages are more well-connected than others, and target languages can benefit from transferring from closely related languages; for many languages, the set of closely related languages does not include English. In this work, we study the impact of source language for cross-lingual transfer, demonstrating the importance of selecting source languages that have high contact with the target language. We also construct a novel benchmark dataset for close contact Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese (CJKV) languages to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact. To comprehensively capture contact between these languages, we propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts via Contrastive Learning objectives, leading to enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.<|reference_end|>
@article{nguyen2024cori:,
    title={CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration -- A step towards
  Cross-lingual Transfer Beyond Textual Scripts},
    author={Hoang H. Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Ye Liu, Natalie Parde, Eugene
  Rohrbaugh, Philip S. Yu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.12618},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.12618},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG}
}