arXiv Computation and Language

How Useful are LLMs for Grammar Engineering? Cantonese ParGram Resources and Controlled Experimental Evaluation with English Baselines

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Can LLMs Write Correct TLA+ Specifications? Evaluating Natural-Language-to-TLA+ Generation

arXiv:2606. 05792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: TLA+ has supported industrial verification at companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, yet writing correct TLA+ specifications from natural language still requires time and expertise, which limits adoption.

By Arslan Bisharat, Brian Ortiz, Eric Spencer, Khushboo Bhadauria, TaiNing Wang, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Laufer, Mohammed Abuhamad
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

A Factorial Study of Synthetic Data Generation for Low-Resource Machine Translation using Grammar Books

The paper presents a pipeline that leverages large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from descriptive grammar books, producing synthetic parallel corpora for fine‑tuning machine translation models. Evaluated on three low‑resource languages—Kalamang, Tuatschin, and Mandan—the synthetic data improves translation quality over seed‑data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, achieving up to +8.8 ChrF++ gains. A factorial study across 96 configurations identifies which combinations of target part‑of‑speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume drive performance gains and where they fail, demonstrating that static linguistic documentation can be repurposed for practical translation tools for severely under‑resourced languages.

By Varun Ghat Ravikumar, Sina Ahmadi, Lena J\"ager, Rico Sennrich
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Reasoning over Grammar: Can Synthetic Linguistic Reasoning Traces Enhance Low-Resource Machine Translation?

The paper explores whether structured linguistic reasoning traces can improve low‑resource machine translation by guiding large language models (LLMs). It proposes a pipeline that automatically generates step‑by‑step reasoning traces from Universal Dependencies treebanks, dictionaries, and grammar‑rule banks, and evaluates these traces in in‑context learning, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement fine‑tuning on Xibe and Chintang. The results show that providing reliable reasoning traces at inference time significantly boosts translation quality, whereas using them as training data yields smaller, less consistent gains, indicating that LLMs can benefit from grammatical guidance but struggle to generate accurate analyses themselves.

By Renhao Pei, Yihong Liu, Sampo Pyysalo, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Shaoxiong Ji
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

From Parallels to Divergence: Language Models' Learning of Action Nominal Constructions

The paper examines how language models learn action nominal constructions (ANCs) across 96 synthetic target languages with varied grammatical features. Using GPT‑2‑small trained from scratch, the study evaluates models on minimal pairs covering 34 grammatical phenomena, revealing that models mirror typological patterns in basic clause configurations but diverge in complement systems and ANC strategies. The findings suggest that natural language distributions may arise from both general learning pressures and functional demands not fully captured by current model experiments.

By Iskar Deng, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Scoring Both Directions: LLMs realize the MRS they cannot reliably parse

The paper evaluates two large language models, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Opus 5, on the bidirectional English Resource Grammar (ERG) tasks of generating English from Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) and parsing English into MRS. In generation, Opus achieves 76.3 BLEU—surpassing a 72k‑pair trained system and matching a million‑pair system—while Sonnet scores 65.7 BLEU, rising to 69.6 when selecting from ACE’s candidates. In parsing, both models lag behind ACE, attaining only 57.2 and 65.5 F₁ respectively, with exact‑match on about 1 % of sentences, highlighting that high generation scores do not guarantee accurate semantic parsing.

By Soham Dan
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Which LLM is Best for Translating Natural Language Goals to PDDL

The paper evaluates how well current Large Language Models can translate natural language goals, written by video game testers, into well‑formed PDDL targets for classical planning. Using a carefully designed prompt template, six state‑of‑the‑art LLMs were tested on correctness, speed, and error tendencies with real‑world benchmarks. All models achieved high correctness (>92%), with Gemini 2.5 Flash reaching 96% accuracy and the fewest false positives, while GPT‑4.1 was the fastest, yet differences in performance and occasional failures due to ambiguity and domain limits remain.

By Tomas Balyo, Lukas Chrpa, G. Michael Youngblood