Don’t Touch My Diacritics

Kyle Gorman, Yuval Pinter


Abstract
The common practice of preprocessing text before feeding it into NLP models introduces many decision points which have unintended consequences on model performance. In this opinion piece, we focus on the handling of diacritics in texts originating in many languages and scripts. We demonstrate, through several case studies, the adverse effects of inconsistent encoding of diacritized characters and of removing diacritics altogether. We call on the community to adopt simple but necessary steps across all models and toolkits in order to improve handling of diacritized text and, by extension, increase equity in multilingual NLP.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-short.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
285–291
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-short.25/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kyle Gorman and Yuval Pinter. 2025. Don’t Touch My Diacritics. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 285–291, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Don’t Touch My Diacritics (Gorman & Pinter, NAACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-short.25.pdf