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 insight is to demonstrate linguistic knowledge of an unseen language in an LLM’s prompt, including a dictionary, a grammar book, and morphologically analyzed input text. We implement LingoLLM on top of two models, GPT-4 and Mixtral, and evaluate their performance on 5 tasks across 8 endangered or low-resource languages. Our results show that LingoLLM elevates translation capability from GPT-4’s 0 to 10.5 BLEU for 10 language directions. Our findings demonstrate the tremendous value of linguistic knowledge in the age of LLMs for endangered languages. Our data, code, and model generations will be released to the public. Our data, code, and model generations can be found at https://github.com/LLiLab/llm4endangeredlang.

In this paper, we make a contribution that can be understood from two perspectives: from an NLP perspective, we introduce a small challenge dataset for NLI with large lexical overlap, which minimises the possibility of models discerning entailment solely based on token distinctions, and show that GPT-4 and Llama 2 fail it with strong bias. We then create further challenging sub-tasks in an effort to explain this failure. From a Computational Linguistics perspective, we identify a group of constructions with three classes of adjectives which cannot be distinguished by surface features. This enables us to probe for LLM’s understanding of these constructions in various ways, and we find that they fail in a variety of ways to distinguish between them, suggesting that they don’t adequately represent their meaning or capture the lexical properties of phrasal heads.

Thousands of the world’s languages are in danger of extinction—a tremendous threat to cultural identities and human language diversity. Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a form of linguistic annotation that can support documentation and resource creation for these languages’ communities. IGT typically consists of (1) transcriptions, (2) morphological segmentation, (3) glosses, and (4) free translations to a majority language. We propose Wav2Gloss: a task in which these four annotation components are extracted automatically from speech, and introduce the first dataset to this end, Fieldwork: a corpus of speech with all these annotations, derived from the work of field linguists, covering 37 languages, with standard formatting, and train/dev/test splits. We provide various baselines to lay the groundwork for future research on IGT generation from speech, such as end-to-end versus cascaded, monolingual versus multilingual, and single-task versus multi-task approaches.

Construction Grammar (CxG) has recently been used as the basis for probing studies that have investigated the performance of large pretrained language models (PLMs) with respect to the structure and meaning of constructions. In this position paper, we make suggestions for the continuation and augmentation of this line of research. We look at probing methodology that was not designed with CxG in mind, as well as probing methodology that was designed for specific constructions. We analyse selected previous work in detail, and provide our view of the most important challenges and research questions that this promising new field faces.

Interlinear glossing provides a vital type of morphosyntactic annotation, both for linguists and language revitalists, and numerous conventions exist for representing it formally and computationally. Some of these formats are human readable; others are machine readable. Some are easy to edit with general-purpose tools. Few represent non-concatentative processes like infixation, reduplication, mutation, truncation, and tonal overwriting in a consistent and formally rigorous way (on par with affixation). We propose an annotation convention—Generalized Glossing Guidelines (GGG) that combines all of these positive properties using an Item-and-Process (IP) framework. We describe the format, demonstrate its linguistic adequacy, and compare it with two other interlinear glossed text annotation schemes.

In our submission to the SIGMORPHON 2023 Shared Task on interlinear glossing (IGT), we explore approaches to data augmentation and modeling across seven low-resource languages. For data augmentation, we explore two approaches: creating artificial data from the provided training data and utilizing existing IGT resources in other languages. On the modeling side, we test an enhanced version of the provided token classification baseline as well as a pretrained multilingual seq2seq model. Additionally, we apply post-correction using a dictionary for Gitksan, the language with the smallest amount of data. We find that our token classification models are the best performing, with the highest word-level accuracy for Arapaho and highest morpheme-level accuracy for Gitksan out of all submissions. We also show that data augmentation is an effective strategy, though applying artificial data pretraining has very different effects across both models tested.

Cross-lingual language tasks typically require a substantial amount of annotated data or parallel translation data. We explore whether language representations that capture relationships among languages can be learned and subsequently leveraged in cross-lingual tasks without the use of parallel data. We generate dense embeddings for 29 languages using a denoising autoencoder, and evaluate the embeddings using the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and two extrinsic tasks in a zero-shot setting: cross-lingual dependency parsing and cross-lingual natural language inference.