Mining Large Language Models for Low-Resource Language Data: Comparing Elicitation Strategies for Hausa and Fongbe

Pericles Adjovi, Prasenjit Mitra, Roald Eiselen


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on data contributed by low-resource language communities, including curated datasets such as MasakhaNER and MAFAND-MT, yet the linguistic knowledge encoded in these models remains accessible only through commercial APIs. This paper investigates whether strategic prompting can extract usable text data from LLMs for two West African languages: Hausa (Afroasiatic, approximately 80 million speakers) and Fongbe (Niger-Congo, approximately 2 million speakers). We systematically compare six elicitation task types: creative writing, functional text, structured knowledge, dialogue, topic-switching probes, and constrained generation across two commercial LLMs (GPT-4o Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash). Generated outputs are evaluated on linguistic accuracy, lexical diversity, domain coverage, and code-switching rates through automatic metrics assessment. Our findings reveal that elicitation strategy significantly affects output quality and that optimal strategies differ by language: Hausa benefits from volume-maximizing tasks such as functional text and dialogue, while Fongbe requires constraint-heavy prompts that enforce monolingual output. GPT-4o Mini extracts 6–41x more usable target-language words per API call than Gemini, though Gemini achieves higher language purity for Fongbe on constrained tasks. We provide a practical framework for low-resource language communities to maximize usable data extraction from LLMs and release all generated corpora and code.
Anthology ID:
2026.rail-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Muzi Matfunjwa, Mmasibidi Setaka, Rooweither Mabuya, Menno van Zaanen
Venues:
RAIL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
20–30
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-rail-03
DOI:
10.63317/46q6m333tn2n
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pericles Adjovi, Prasenjit Mitra, and Roald Eiselen. 2026. Mining Large Language Models for Low-Resource Language Data: Comparing Elicitation Strategies for Hausa and Fongbe. In Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC 2026, pages 20–30, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Mining Large Language Models for Low-Resource Language Data: Comparing Elicitation Strategies for Hausa and Fongbe (Adjovi et al., RAIL 2026)
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