LexC-Gen: Generating Data for Extremely Low-Resource Languages with Large Language Models and Bilingual Lexicons

Zheng Xin Yong, Cristina Menghini, Stephen Bach


Abstract
Data scarcity in low-resource languages can be addressed with word-to-word translations from labeled task data in high-resource languages using bilingual lexicons. However, bilingual lexicons often have limited lexical overlap with task data, which results in poor translation coverage and lexicon utilization. We propose lexicon-conditioned data generation LexC-Gen, a method that generates low-resource-language classification task data at scale. Specifically, LexC-Gen first uses high-resource-language words from bilingual lexicons to generate lexicon-compatible task data, and then it translates them into low-resource languages with bilingual lexicons via word translation. Across 17 extremely low-resource languages, LexC-Gen generated data is competitive with expert-translated gold data, and yields on average 5.6 and 8.9 points improvement over existing lexicon-based word translation methods on sentiment analysis and topic classification tasks respectively. Through ablation study, we show that conditioning on bilingual lexicons is the key component of LexC-Gen. LexC-Gen serves as a potential solution to close the performance gap between open-source multilingual models, such as BLOOMZ and Aya-101, and state-of-the-art commercial models like GPT-4o on low-resource-language tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.818
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13990–14009
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.818
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Zheng Xin Yong, Cristina Menghini, and Stephen Bach. 2024. LexC-Gen: Generating Data for Extremely Low-Resource Languages with Large Language Models and Bilingual Lexicons. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 13990–14009, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LexC-Gen: Generating Data for Extremely Low-Resource Languages with Large Language Models and Bilingual Lexicons (Yong et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.818.pdf
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