High-quality Data-to-Text Generation for Severely Under-Resourced Languages with Out-of-the-box Large Language Models

Michela Lorandi, Anya Belz


Abstract
The performance of NLP methods for severely under-resourced languages cannot currently hope to match the state of the art in NLP methods for well resourced languages. We explore the extent to which pretrained large language models (LLMs) can bridge this gap, via the example of data-to-text generation for Irish, Welsh, Breton and Maltese. We test LLMs on these under-resourced languages and English, in a range of scenarios. We find that LLMs easily set the state of the art for the under-resourced languages by substantial margins, as measured by both automatic and human evaluations. For all our languages, human evaluation shows on-a-par performance with humans for our best systems, but BLEU scores collapse compared to English, casting doubt on the metric’s suitability for evaluating non-task-specific systems. Overall, our results demonstrate the great potential of LLMs to bridge the performance gap for under-resourced languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.98
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1451–1461
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.98
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michela Lorandi and Anya Belz. 2024. High-quality Data-to-Text Generation for Severely Under-Resourced Languages with Out-of-the-box Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 1451–1461, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
High-quality Data-to-Text Generation for Severely Under-Resourced Languages with Out-of-the-box Large Language Models (Lorandi & Belz, Findings 2024)
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