A pipeline that uses large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from grammar books and generate synthetic parallel corpora for fine-tuning-rather than feeding grammar content into prompts at inference time, as in prior work is introduced.
Abstract
Most endangered languages lack the parallel data required for machine translation, despite the existence of descriptive grammar books. We introduce a pipeline that uses large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from grammar books and generate synthetic parallel corpora for fine-tuning-rather than feeding grammar content into prompts at inference time, as in prior work. Validated on three typologically diverse low-resource languages-Kalamang (Papuan), Tuatschin (Romance), and Mandan (Siouan)-we show that fine-tuning on synthetic data improves over seed-data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, with best-case ChrF++ gains of +8.8, +5.3, and +3.3 respectively. Through a systematic factorial study across 96 configurations varying target part-of-speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume, we identify which factor combinations drive gains and where they break down. Our results demonstrate that static linguistic documentation can be repurposed for machine translation fine-tuning, offering a practical path towards translation tools for severely under-resourced languages.
Evaluating the feasibility of translation-based fine-tuning across six NLP tasks demonstrates that translation-based fine-tuning offers a scalable, resource-efficient, and empirically validated path for extending NLP to low-resource languages while advancing linguistic inclusivity and sustainability in artificial intelligence.
H. Muizelaar, Giulia Rivetti, Marco Spruit et al.· 0 citations
The results demonstrate a reproducible, CPU-centric pipeline, proving that the lack of specialized GPU infrastructure is not an insurmountable obstacle for digital language preservation and baseline NMT development.
O. T. Olise· International Journal of Com...· 0 citations
This paper presents new Cantonese ParGram resources and evaluates LLMs for knowledge-driven grammar engineering within a controlled experimental paradigm. Using Cantonese ParGram resources as gold standards, with corresponding English baselines, we investigate whether OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b and GPT-5.4 can generate machine-processable grammars from sentences and target formal structures under systematically varied prompting conditions. GPT-5.4 outperformed gpt-oss-120b, while grammars generated from target formal structures generally outperformed those generated from sentences. Although both models could generate locally plausible phrase-structure rules, lexical entries, and templates, they often struggled to coordinate interacting formal constraints, especially in multi-construction settings. The results characterize both the capabilities and limitations of current LLMs for potential integration into AI-assisted expert workflows: LLMs may support intermediate stages of grammar development, but human linguistic expertise remains central to analysis, validation, and refinement. The study also contributes new Cantonese symbolic grammatical resources.
The findings show that manual transliteration consistently yields the best translation performance, while noisy automatic romanization reduces these gains, and that LLM-based translation can be competitive with, and in some settings outperform, fine-tuned NMT systems, although this advantage comes with lower interpretability.
A. Mansurova, Meruert Bekmukhamedova, Bekarys Baibolat et al.· Electronics· 0 citations
This paper introduces *TranslatePsy-AfriSLM*, a collection of open-source MT resources for 19 Sub-Saharan African languages, including curated parallel data, African-specialized synthetic data, and a family of fine-tuned SLMs.
Milan Gritta, Patrik Lambert, Jihye Back et al.· 0 citations
The findings show that the quality of the datasets and their alignment with the domain will greatly affect the performance of the model, that attention-based mechanisms can aid in explain ability, and that few-shot large language models can still produce structurally coherent translations of Tamil.
S. Sriharshaa, Sangeetha Sivanesan, S. JayaNirmala· arXiv.org· 0 citations
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