The Role of Orthographic Consistency in Multilingual Embedding Models for Text Classification in Arabic-Script Languages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18762v1
• Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:28:33 GMT
• Title: The Role of Orthographic Consistency in Multilingual Embedding Models for Text Classification in Arabic-Script Languages
• Authors: Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Amir H. Gandomi, Tarik A Rashid, Seyedali Mirjalili, Laith Abualigah, Milena Živković, Hadi Veisi,
• Abstract summary: We introduce the Arabic Script RoBERTa (AS-RoBERTa) family: four RoBERTa-based models, each pre-trained on a large corpus tailored to its specific language.<n>Our results highlight the value of script-aware specialization for languages using the Arabic script and support further work on pre-training strategies rooted in script and language specificity.
• Score: 30.39307182175106
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In natural language processing, multilingual models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa promise broad coverage but often struggle with languages that share a script yet differ in orthographic norms and cultural context. This issue is especially notable in Arabic-script languages such as Kurdish Sorani, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. We introduce the Arabic Script RoBERTa (AS-RoBERTa) family: four RoBERTa-based models, each pre-trained on a large corpus tailored to its specific language. By focusing pre-training on language-specific script features and statistics, our models capture patterns overlooked by general-purpose models. When fine-tuned on classification tasks, AS-RoBERTa variants outperform mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa by 2 to 5 percentage points. An ablation study confirms that script-focused pre-training is central to these gains. Error analysis using confusion matrices shows how shared script traits and domain-specific content affect performance. Our results highlight the value of script-aware specialization for languages using the Arabic script and support further work on pre-training strategies rooted in script and language specificity.

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