Hire a Linguist!: Learning Endangered Languages with In-Context Linguistic Descriptions

arXiv:2402.18025v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: How can large language models (LLMs) process and translate endangered languages? Many languages lack a large corpus to train a decent LLM; therefore existing LLMs rarely perform well in unseen, endangered languages. On the contrary, we observe that 2000 endangered languages, though without a large corpus, have a grammar book or a dictionary. We propose LINGOLLM, a training-free approach to enable an LLM to process unseen languages that hardly occur in its pre-training. Our key …

arxiv context cs.cl languages linguist type