Toward a Cross-Lingual Romanization Ecosystem for Sinitic Languages: A Paired Mandarin-Cantonese Case Study — Paper

Abstract

This paper proposes the Sinitic Romanization Ecosystem, a cross-lingual Sinitic romanization design framework with supporting digital infrastructure and a community-driven open-source workflow. The design framework addresses the lack of systematic cross-lingual romanization alignment among Sinitic languages through four design principles: phonetic correspondence for representing similar sounds with similar romanized symbols, historical-phonological correspondence for aligning cognate romanization strings, one-phoneme-one-symbol, and basic Latin-letter use, with a balancing consideration recognizing trade-offs among these principles. For the main paired case study, we develop CantRomZJ1 and MandRomZJ1, Cantonese and Mandarin romanization schemes following the design framework, respectively. We also develop schemes for several other Sinitic languages, including Meixian Hakka, Shanghai Wu, and Nanjing Jianghuai Mandarin, following the same design framework. To bring the romanization schemes into practical use, we develop open-source infrastructure for structured romanization storage, conversion, parsing, dictionary construction, and input-method generation. Finally, we evaluate the design framework through speech-to-romanization experiments based on Meta's Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) fine-tuning. Compared with the Pinyin+Jyutping baseline, our MandRomZJ1+CantRomZJ1 condition reduces Cantonese WER and CER by 7.80% and 10.61%, respectively. These results suggest that cross-lingual romanization alignment can improve transfer in low-resource Sinitic speech technology.

Authors 4

Zijie Zhang, Tan Lee, Yong Cao, Benyou Wang

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2608.29170
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2608.29170
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2608.29170
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

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T19

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6 h ago

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Authors: Zijie Zhang, Tan Lee, Yong Cao

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.29170	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperToward a Cross-Lingual Romanization Ecosystem for Sinitic Languages: A Paired Mandarin-Cantonese Case Study
New paper: Toward a Cross-Lingual Romanization Ecosystem for Sinitic Languages: A Paired Mandarin-Cantonese Case Study
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arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL	feed	T1· Official	5 h ago	1

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