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    <abstract>Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach to machine translation (MT) for extremely low-resource languages by incorporating linguistic resources through in-context learning. However, LLMs often struggle to apply grammatical information effectively during translation. Inspired by recent progress in chain-of-thought reasoning, we investigate whether low-resource MT can benefit from structured intermediate steps of linguistic analysis and grammatical reasoning. We propose a pipeline for automatically generating step-by-step linguistic reasoning traces from Universal Dependencies treebanks, dictionaries, and grammar-rule banks. We evaluate these traces in three settings: in-context learning (ICL), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), on Xibe and Chintang as test cases. Our results show that linguistic reasoning traces are most effective as inference-time guidance: in ICL, reliable linguistic reasoning traces substantially improve translation performance across models, languages, and metrics. In contrast, using these traces as training data yields smaller and less consistent gains, as models learn the format but often generate error-prone content. These findings suggest that LLMs can leverage grammatical information for low-resource MT when given reliable linguistic analyses, while learning to generate such analyses remains a major bottleneck.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation?
%A Pei, Renhao
%A Liu, Yihong
%A Pyysalo, Sampo
%A Schuetze, Hinrich
%A Ji, Shaoxiong
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F pei-etal-2026-reasoning
%X Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach to machine translation (MT) for extremely low-resource languages by incorporating linguistic resources through in-context learning. However, LLMs often struggle to apply grammatical information effectively during translation. Inspired by recent progress in chain-of-thought reasoning, we investigate whether low-resource MT can benefit from structured intermediate steps of linguistic analysis and grammatical reasoning. We propose a pipeline for automatically generating step-by-step linguistic reasoning traces from Universal Dependencies treebanks, dictionaries, and grammar-rule banks. We evaluate these traces in three settings: in-context learning (ICL), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), on Xibe and Chintang as test cases. Our results show that linguistic reasoning traces are most effective as inference-time guidance: in ICL, reliable linguistic reasoning traces substantially improve translation performance across models, languages, and metrics. In contrast, using these traces as training data yields smaller and less consistent gains, as models learn the format but often generate error-prone content. These findings suggest that LLMs can leverage grammatical information for low-resource MT when given reliable linguistic analyses, while learning to generate such analyses remains a major bottleneck.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.281/
%P 5916-5933

Markdown (Informal)

[Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.281/) (Pei et al., Findings 2026)

• Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation? (Pei et al., Findings 2026)

ACL

• Renhao Pei, Yihong Liu, Sampo Pyysalo, Hinrich Schuetze, and Shaoxiong Ji. 2026. Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 5916–5933, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.