%0 Conference Proceedings %T Cross-lingual Named Entity List Search via Transliteration %A Khakhmovich, Aleksandr %A Pavlova, Svetlana %A Kirillova, Kira %A Arefyev, Nikolay %A Savilova, Ekaterina %Y Calzolari, Nicoletta %Y Béchet, Frédéric %Y Blache, Philippe %Y Choukri, Khalid %Y Cieri, Christopher %Y Declerck, Thierry %Y Goggi, Sara %Y Isahara, Hitoshi %Y Maegaard, Bente %Y Mariani, Joseph %Y Mazo, Hélène %Y Moreno, Asuncion %Y Odijk, Jan %Y Piperidis, Stelios %S Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference %D 2020 %8 May %I European Language Resources Association %C Marseille, France %@ 979-10-95546-34-4 %G English %F khakhmovich-etal-2020-cross %X Out-of-vocabulary words are still a challenge in cross-lingual Natural Language Processing tasks, for which transliteration from source to target language or script is one of the solutions. In this study, we collect a personal name dataset in 445 Wikidata languages (37 scripts), train Transformer-based multilingual transliteration models on 6 high- and 4 less-resourced languages, compare them with bilingual models from (Merhav and Ash, 2018) and determine that multilingual models perform better for less-resourced languages. We discover that intrinsic evaluation, i.e comparison to a single gold standard, might not be appropriate in the task of transliteration due to its high variability. For this reason, we propose using extrinsic evaluation of transliteration via the cross-lingual named entity list search task (e.g. personal name search in contacts list). Our code and datasets are publicly available online. %U https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.524 %P 4247-4255