Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understanding

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Auteurs principaux: Tran, Khanh-Tung, O'Sullivan, Barry, Nguyen, Hoang D.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Tran, Khanh-Tung
O'Sullivan, Barry
Nguyen, Hoang D.
author_facet Tran, Khanh-Tung
O'Sullivan, Barry
Nguyen, Hoang D.
contents Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle reasoning tasks by generating chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, yet these gains have largely applied to high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages behind. In this work, we first investigate CoT techniques in extremely low-resource scenarios through previous prompting, model-editing, and fine-tuning approaches. We introduce English-Pivoted CoT Training, leveraging the insight that LLMs internally operate in a latent space aligned toward the dominant language. Given input in a low-resource language, we perform supervised fine-tuning to generate CoT in English and output the final response in the target language. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach outperforms other baselines with up to 28.33% improvement in low-resource scenarios. Our analysis and additional experiments, including Mixed-Language CoT and Two-Stage Training, show that explicitly separating language understanding from reasoning enhances cross-lingual reasoning abilities. To facilitate future work, we also release \emph{LC2024}, the first benchmark for mathematical tasks in Irish, an extremely low-resource and endangered language. Our results and resources highlight a practical pathway to multilingual reasoning without extensive retraining in every extremely low-resource language, despite data scarcity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_02890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understanding
Tran, Khanh-Tung
O'Sullivan, Barry
Nguyen, Hoang D.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle reasoning tasks by generating chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, yet these gains have largely applied to high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages behind. In this work, we first investigate CoT techniques in extremely low-resource scenarios through previous prompting, model-editing, and fine-tuning approaches. We introduce English-Pivoted CoT Training, leveraging the insight that LLMs internally operate in a latent space aligned toward the dominant language. Given input in a low-resource language, we perform supervised fine-tuning to generate CoT in English and output the final response in the target language. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach outperforms other baselines with up to 28.33% improvement in low-resource scenarios. Our analysis and additional experiments, including Mixed-Language CoT and Two-Stage Training, show that explicitly separating language understanding from reasoning enhances cross-lingual reasoning abilities. To facilitate future work, we also release \emph{LC2024}, the first benchmark for mathematical tasks in Irish, an extremely low-resource and endangered language. Our results and resources highlight a practical pathway to multilingual reasoning without extensive retraining in every extremely low-resource language, despite data scarcity.
title Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understanding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02890