@inproceedings{dai-etal-2025-next,
    title = "Next-Level {C}antonese-to-{M}andarin Translation: Fine-Tuning and Post-Processing with {LLM}s",
    author = "Dai, Yuqian  and
      Chan, Chun Fai  and
      Wong, Ying Ki  and
      Pun, Tsz Ho",
    editor = "Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Rayson, Paul  and
      Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Gaber, Mohamed  and
      Premasiri, Damith  and
      Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Uyangodage, Lasitha",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.loreslm-1.32/",
    pages = "427--436",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across various natural language processing tasks. Despite these improvements, LLMs continue to face significant challenges, such as grammatical issues and code-switching to English, when applied to low-resource languages like Cantonese in Machine Translation (MT) scenarios. By addressing the unique linguistic and contextual challenges of Cantonese, we present a novel strategy to improve the understanding and translation capabilities of LLMs for Cantonese-to-Mandarin MT. Our strategy comprises three key components: (1) Syntax and Part-of-Speech (POS) fine-tuning, where we use the Universal Dependencies (UD) corpus to fine-tune LLM, focusing on the linguistic structures of Cantonese; (2) Specialized Cantonese to Mandarin sentence pairs, collected from diverse sources such as Cantonese grammar textbooks and manually translated sentences across various domains, to expose the model to a wide range of linguistic contexts; (3) Post-processing with additional LLMs, where we introduce additional LLMs to improve the initial translations, correcting Mandarin grammar and punctuation. Empirical evaluations on human-created test sets show that our proposed strategy improves translation performance and outperforms existing commercial translation models with at least 3 BLEU scores. Additionally, our strategy also benefits other LLMs and a reversed translation direction, demonstrating its generalization and effectiveness."
}