Don't Touch My Diacritics

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.