Can LLMs Help Create Grammar?: Automating Grammar Creation for Endangered Languages with In-Context Learning

Piyapath T. Spencer, Nanthipat Kongborrirak


Abstract
In the present-day documenting and preserving endangered languages, the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a promising approach. This paper explores how LLMs, particularly through in-context learning, can assist in generating grammatical information for low-resource languages with limited amount of data. We takes Moklen as a case study to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in producing coherent grammatical rules and lexical entries using only bilingual dictionaries and parallel sentences of the unknown language without building the model from scratch. Our methodology involves organising the existing linguistic data and prompting to efficiently enable to generate formal XLE grammar. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can successfully capture key grammatical structures and lexical information, although challenges such as the potential for English grammatical biases remain. This study highlights the potential of LLMs to enhance language documentation efforts, providing a cost-effective solution for generating linguistic data and contributing to the preservation of endangered languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.681
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10214–10227
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.681/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Piyapath T. Spencer and Nanthipat Kongborrirak. 2025. Can LLMs Help Create Grammar?: Automating Grammar Creation for Endangered Languages with In-Context Learning. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10214–10227, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can LLMs Help Create Grammar?: Automating Grammar Creation for Endangered Languages with In-Context Learning (Spencer & Kongborrirak, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.681.pdf