Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rahman, Md. Atiqur, Islam, Sabrina, Omi, Mushfiqul Haque
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12273
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912381115826176
author Rahman, Md. Atiqur
Islam, Sabrina
Omi, Mushfiqul Haque
author_facet Rahman, Md. Atiqur
Islam, Sabrina
Omi, Mushfiqul Haque
contents Evaluating machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages poses a persistent challenge, primarily due to the limited availability of high quality reference translations. This issue is further exacerbated in languages with multiple dialects, where linguistic diversity and data scarcity hinder robust evaluation. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising solution through reference-free evaluation techniques; however, their effectiveness diminishes in the absence of dialect-specific context and tailored guidance. In this work, we propose a comprehensive framework that enhances LLM-based MT evaluation using a dialect guided approach. We extend the ONUBAD dataset by incorporating Sylheti-English sentence pairs, corresponding machine translations, and Direct Assessment (DA) scores annotated by native speakers. To address the vocabulary gap, we augment the tokenizer vocabulary with dialect-specific terms. We further introduce a regression head to enable scalar score prediction and design a dialect-guided (DG) prompting strategy. Our evaluation across multiple LLMs shows that the proposed pipeline consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest gain of +0.1083 in Spearman correlation, along with improvements across other evaluation settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/180041123-Atiq/MTEonLowResourceLanguage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12273
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-Based Evaluation of Low-Resource Machine Translation: A Reference-less Dialect Guided Approach with a Refined Sylheti-English Benchmark
Rahman, Md. Atiqur
Islam, Sabrina
Omi, Mushfiqul Haque
Computation and Language
Evaluating machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages poses a persistent challenge, primarily due to the limited availability of high quality reference translations. This issue is further exacerbated in languages with multiple dialects, where linguistic diversity and data scarcity hinder robust evaluation. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising solution through reference-free evaluation techniques; however, their effectiveness diminishes in the absence of dialect-specific context and tailored guidance. In this work, we propose a comprehensive framework that enhances LLM-based MT evaluation using a dialect guided approach. We extend the ONUBAD dataset by incorporating Sylheti-English sentence pairs, corresponding machine translations, and Direct Assessment (DA) scores annotated by native speakers. To address the vocabulary gap, we augment the tokenizer vocabulary with dialect-specific terms. We further introduce a regression head to enable scalar score prediction and design a dialect-guided (DG) prompting strategy. Our evaluation across multiple LLMs shows that the proposed pipeline consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest gain of +0.1083 in Spearman correlation, along with improvements across other evaluation settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/180041123-Atiq/MTEonLowResourceLanguage.
title LLM-Based Evaluation of Low-Resource Machine Translation: A Reference-less Dialect Guided Approach with a Refined Sylheti-English Benchmark
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12273