Back to School: Translation Using Grammar Books

Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not entirely without resources, as bilingual dictionaries and grammar books may be available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world's languages. In this paper, we use dictionaries and grammar books to improve machine translation. We evaluate on 16 typologically diverse low-resource languages, showing encouraging improvements. 1