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

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 goal: 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? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.5/10. This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 7.5/10.