Symphonym: Universal Phonetic Embeddings for Cross-Script Toponym Matching

Excerpt

arXiv:2601.06932v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Matching place names across writing systems is a persistent obstacle to integrating multilingual geographic sources, from modern gazetteers to medieval itineraries and colonial-era surveys. Existing approaches rely on language-specific phonetic algorithms or on romanisation that discards phonetic information, and none generalises across scripts. Symphonym maps toponyms from thirty-six writing systems into a unified 128-dimensional phoneti