Pretrained language models excel in various natural language processing tasks but often neglect the integration of different scripts within a language, constraining their ability to capture richer semantic information, such as in Hindi. In this work, we present a dual-script enhanced feature representation method for Hindi. We combine single-script features from Devanagari and Romanized Hindi Roberta using concatenation, addition, cross-attention, and convolutional networks. The experiment results show that using a dual-script approach significantly improves model performance across various tasks. The addition fusion technique excels in sequence generation tasks, while for text classification, the CNN-based dual-script enhanced representation performs best with longer sentences, and the addition fusion technique is more effective for shorter sequences. Our approach shows significant advantages in multiple natural language processing tasks, providing a new perspective on feature representation for Hindi. Our code has been released on https://github.com/JohnnyChanV/Hindi-Fusion.

Transliteration is an important task in natural language processing (NLP) which aims to convert a name in the source language to the target language without changing its pronunciation. Particularly, transliteration from English to Arabic is highly needed in many applications, especially in countries (e.g., United Arab Emirates (UAE)) whose most citizens are foreigners but the official language is Arabic. In such a task-oriented scenario, namely transliterating the English names to the corresponding Arabic ones, the performance of the transliteration model is highly important. However, most existing neural approaches mainly apply a universal transliteration model with advanced encoders and decoders to the task, where limited attention is paid to leveraging the phonemic association between English and Arabic to further improve model performance. In this paper, we focus on transliteration of people’s names from English to Arabic for the general public. In doing so, we collect a corpus named EANames by extracting high quality name pairs from online resources which better represent the names in the general public than linked Wikipedia entries that are always names of famous people). We propose a model for English-Arabic transliteration, where a memory module modeling the phonemic association between English and Arabic is used to guide the transliteration process. We run experiments on the collected data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for English-Arabic transliteration.