Can Uniform Meaning Representation Help GPT-4 Translate from Indigenous Languages?

Shira Wein


Abstract
While ChatGPT and GPT-based models are able to effectively perform many tasks without additional fine-tuning, they struggle with tasks related to extremely low-resource languages and indigenous languages. Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a semantic representation designed to capture the meaning of texts in many languages, is well-positioned to be leveraged in the development of low-resource language technologies. In this work, we explore the downstream utility of UMR for low-resource languages by incorporating it into GPT-4 prompts. Specifically, we examine the ability of GPT-4 to perform translation from three indigenous languages (Navajo, Arápaho, and Kukama), with and without demonstrations, as well as with and without UMR annotations. Ultimately, we find that in the majority of our test cases, integrating UMR into the prompt results in a statistically significant increase in performance, which is a promising indication of future applications of the UMR formalism.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-short.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
278–285
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.acl-short.23/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.acl-short.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shira Wein. 2025. Can Uniform Meaning Representation Help GPT-4 Translate from Indigenous Languages?. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 278–285, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Uniform Meaning Representation Help GPT-4 Translate from Indigenous Languages? (Wein, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.acl-short.23.pdf