Can LLMs Handle Low-Resource Dialects? A Case Study on Translation and Common Sense Reasoning in Šariš

Viktória Ondrejová, Marek Šuppa


Abstract
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in advancing natural language processing in dialect-specific contexts, their effectiveness in these settings has yet to be thoroughly assessed. This study introduces a case study on Šariš, a dialect of Slovak, which is itself a language with fewer resources, focusing on Machine Translation and Common Sense Reasoning tasks. We employ LLMs in a zero-shot configuration and for data augmentation to refine Slovak-Šariš and Šariš-Slovak translation models. The accuracy of these models is then manually verified by native speakers. Additionally, we introduce ŠarišCOPA, a new dataset for causal common sense reasoning, which, alongside SlovakCOPA, serves to evaluate LLM’s performance in a zero-shot framework. Our findings highlight LLM’s capabilities in processing low-resource dialects and suggest a viable approach for initiating dialect-specific translation models in such contexts.
Anthology ID:
2024.vardial-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Yves Scherrer, Tommi Jauhiainen, Nikola Ljubešić, Marcos Zampieri, Preslav Nakov, Jörg Tiedemann
Venues:
VarDial | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
130–139
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.vardial-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.vardial-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Viktória Ondrejová and Marek Šuppa. 2024. Can LLMs Handle Low-Resource Dialects? A Case Study on Translation and Common Sense Reasoning in Šariš. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024), pages 130–139, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can LLMs Handle Low-Resource Dialects? A Case Study on Translation and Common Sense Reasoning in Šariš (Ondrejová & Šuppa, VarDial-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.vardial-1.11.pdf
Supplementary material:
 2024.vardial-1.11.SupplementaryMaterial.txt