SubmissionNumber#=%=#5 FinalPaperTitle#=%=#Modeling Orthographic Variation in Occitan's Dialects ShortPaperTitle#=%=# NumberOfPages#=%=#11 CopyrightSigned#=%=# JobTitle#==# Organization#==# Abstract#==#Effectively normalizing spellings in textual data poses a considerable challenge, especially for low-resource languages lacking standardized writing systems. In this study, we fine-tuned a multilingual model with data from several Occitan dialects and conducted a series of experiments to assess the model's representations of these dialects. For evaluation purposes, we compiled a parallel lexicon encompassing four Occitan dialects. Intrinsic evaluations of the model's embeddings revealed that surface similarity between the dialects strengthened representations. When the model was further fine-tuned for part-of-speech tagging, its performance was robust to dialectical variation, even when trained solely on part-of-speech data from a single dialect. Our findings suggest that large multilingual models minimize the need for spelling normalization during pre-processing. Author{1}{Firstname}#=%=#Zachary William Author{1}{Lastname}#=%=#Hopton Author{1}{Username}#=%=#zhopto3 Author{1}{Email}#=%=#zacharywilliam.hopton@uzh.ch Author{1}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Zurich Author{2}{Firstname}#=%=#Noëmi Author{2}{Lastname}#=%=#Aepli Author{2}{Username}#=%=#naepli Author{2}{Email}#=%=#noemi.aepli@uzh.ch Author{2}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Zurich ========== èéáğö