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 + 0.1164 in Spearman correlation, along with notable improvements in other evaluation settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/180041123-Atiq/MTEonLowResourceLanguage .

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LLM-Based Evaluation of Low-Resource Machine Translation: A Reference-less Dialect-Guided Approach with a Refined Sylheti-English Benchmark

  • Md. Atiqur Rahman,
  • Sabrina Islam,
  • Mushfiqul Haque Omi

摘要

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 + 0.1164 in Spearman correlation, along with notable improvements in other evaluation settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/180041123-Atiq/MTEonLowResourceLanguage .