Teaching Large Language Models an Unseen Language on the Fly

Chen Zhang, Xiao Liu, Jiuheng Lin, Yansong Feng


Abstract
Existing large language models struggle to support numerous low-resource languages, particularly the extremely low-resource ones, for which there is minimal training data available for effective parameter updating. We thus investigate whether LLMs can learn a new language on the fly solely through prompting. To study this question, we collect a research suite for Zhuang, a language supported by no LLMs currently. We introduce DiPMT++, a framework for adapting LLMs to unseen languages by in-context learning. Using a dictionary and 5K parallel sentences only, DiPMT++ significantly enhances the performance of GPT-4 from 0 to 16 BLEU for Chinese-to-Zhuang translation and achieves 32 BLEU for Zhuang-to-Chinese translation. We also validate the effectiveness of our framework on Kalamang, another unseen language. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of DiPMT++ in aiding humans in translating completely unseen languages, which could contribute to the preservation of linguistic diversity.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.519
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8783–8800
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.519
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.519
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Zhang, Xiao Liu, Jiuheng Lin, and Yansong Feng. 2024. Teaching Large Language Models an Unseen Language on the Fly. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 8783–8800, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Teaching Large Language Models an Unseen Language on the Fly (Zhang et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.519.pdf