@inproceedings{elsner-needle-2023-translating,
    title = "Translating a low-resource language using {GPT}-3 and a human-readable dictionary",
    author = "Elsner, Micha  and
      Needle, Jordan",
    editor = {Nicolai, Garrett  and
      Chodroff, Eleanor  and
      Mailhot, Frederic  and
      {\c{C}}{\"o}ltekin, {\c{C}}a{\u{g}}r{\i}},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigmorphon-1.2",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.sigmorphon-1.2",
    pages = "1--13",
    abstract = "We investigate how well words in the polysynthetic language Inuktitut can be translated by combining dictionary definitions, without use of a neural machine translation model trained on parallel text. Such a translation system would allow natural language technology to benefit from resources designed for community use in a language revitalization or education program, rather than requiring a separate parallel corpus. We show that the text-to-text generation capabilities of GPT-3 allow it to perform this task with BLEU scores of up to 18.5. We investigate prompting GPT-3 to provide multiple translations, which can help slightly, and providing it with grammar information, which is mostly ineffective. Finally, we test GPT-3{'}s ability to derive morpheme definitions from whole-word translations, but find this process is prone to errors including hallucinations.",
}

We investigate how well words in the polysynthetic language Inuktitut can be translated by combining dictionary definitions, without use of a neural machine translation model trained on parallel text. Such a translation system would allow natural language technology to benefit from resources designed for community use in a language revitalization or education program, rather than requiring a separate parallel corpus. We show that the text-to-text generation capabilities of GPT-3 allow it to perform this task with BLEU scores of up to 18.5. We investigate prompting GPT-3 to provide multiple translations, which can help slightly, and providing it with grammar information, which is mostly ineffective. Finally, we test GPT-3{'}s ability to derive morpheme definitions from whole-word translations, but find this process is prone to errors including hallucinations.
Elsner, Micha Needle, Jordan
Translating a low-resource language using GPT-3 and a human-readable dictionary