Back-Translation Still Matters: Leveraging Monolingual Data for Low-Resource Machine Translation with LLMs
Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLMs) are effective on many tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. For machine translation of low-resource languages, the obvious options are few-shot prompting and fine-tuning on a small parallel set. We ask: what if moderate amounts of low-resource monolingual data are also available? We argue that, rather than continued pretraining, a more effective use of this data is the pre-LLM era technique of back-translation (BT). The current fine-tuned LLM translates monolingual sentences in each language, and the resulting pairs train it in the reverse direction. Updates on the parallel set are interleaved for stable learning. With 1K parallel pairs on Odia ...
| Authors | Divyanshu Bathla, Parag Singla, Jitin Singla |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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