Qimin Sheng
Author directory2026
In-Context Learning for Upper Sorbian to German Translation: Comparing Lexical and Morpho-Syntactic Information
Qimin Sheng | Marion Di Marco | Alexander Fraser
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Qimin Sheng | Marion Di Marco | Alexander Fraser
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
LLM-based translation remains challenging for low-resource languages, as LLMs often lack linguistic knowledge due to their limited representation in pre-training data. This is particularly problematic for morphologically rich languages where a large vocabulary can lead to further data sparsity.
Previous work has shown that providing external guidance on the source sentence in the form of language-specific information can help LLMs with tasks such as machine translation. In this study, we investigate zero-shot context augmentation for Upper Sorbian-to-German translation by enriching prompts with different types of contextual information: translation candidates in the form of bilingual dictionary entries, and morpho-syntactic analysis provided through morphological tagging. We first compare the effectiveness of these types of information in a zero-shot setting and then evaluate whether they generalize across additional experimental settings. We find that context-augmented prompting can improve Upper Sorbian-to-German translation. Contexts only containing translation candidates perform overall best, whereas morpho-syntactic analysis offers limited benefits, both on its own and in combination with lexical cues.
Previous work has shown that providing external guidance on the source sentence in the form of language-specific information can help LLMs with tasks such as machine translation. In this study, we investigate zero-shot context augmentation for Upper Sorbian-to-German translation by enriching prompts with different types of contextual information: translation candidates in the form of bilingual dictionary entries, and morpho-syntactic analysis provided through morphological tagging. We first compare the effectiveness of these types of information in a zero-shot setting and then evaluate whether they generalize across additional experimental settings. We find that context-augmented prompting can improve Upper Sorbian-to-German translation. Contexts only containing translation candidates perform overall best, whereas morpho-syntactic analysis offers limited benefits, both on its own and in combination with lexical cues.