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Data Augmentation for Maltese NLP using Transliterated and Machine Translated Arabic Data

arXiv 2509.12853 ↗First posted 16 Sep 2025cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Maltese is a unique Semitic language that has evolved under extensive influence from Romance and Germanic languages, particularly Italian and English. Despite its Semitic roots, its orthography is based on the Latin script, creating a gap between it and its closest linguistic relatives in Arabic. In this paper, we explore whether Arabic-language resources can support Maltese natural language processing (NLP) through cross-lingual augmentation techniques. We investigate multiple strategies for aligning Arabic textual data with Maltese, including various transliteration schemes and machine translation (MT) approaches. As part of this, we also introduce novel transliteration systems that better represent Maltese orthography. We evaluate the impact of these augmentations on monolingual and mutlilingual models and demonstrate that Arabic-based augmentation can significantly benefit Maltese NLP tasks.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 11 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

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References · 11

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2019Beto, Bentz, Becas: The Surprising Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of BERTcited by 301
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  5. 2020A Closer Look at Few-Shot Crosslingual Transfer: The Choice of Shots Matterscited by 45
  6. 2021Morphosyntactic Tagging with Pre-trained Language Models for Arabic and its Dialectscited by 14
  7. 2022Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for a Low-Resource Language: New Corpus and BERT Models for Maltesecited by 14
  8. 2019ArSentD-LEV: A Multi-Topic Corpus for Target-based Sentiment Analysis in Arabic Levantine Tweetscited by 11
  9. 2024TransMI: A Framework to Create Strong Baselines from Multilingual Pretrained Language Models for Transliterated Datacited by 9
  10. 2024Cross-Lingual Transfer from Related Languages: Treating Low-Resource Maltese as Multilingual Code-Switchingcited by 5
  11. 2021Automatic Romanization of Arabic Bibliographic Recordscited by 3

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