Papers › On Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Large Language Models

On Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Large Language Models

21 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.13995archive 2025-07-28

Yaoyiran Li, Anna Korhonen, Ivan Vulić

Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is a core task in multilingual NLP that still, to a large extent, relies on calculating cross-lingual word representations. Inspired by the global paradigm shift in NLP towards Large Language Models (LLMs), we examine the potential of the latest generation of LLMs for the development of bilingual lexicons. We ask the following research question: Is it possible to prompt and fine-tune multilingual LLMs (mLLMs) for BLI, and how does this approach compare against and complement current BLI approaches? To this end, we systematically study 1) zero-shot prompting for unsupervised BLI and 2) few-shot in-context prompting with a set of seed translation pairs, both without any LLM fine-tuning, as well as 3) standard BLI-oriented fine-tuning of smaller LLMs. We experiment with 18 open-source text-to-text mLLMs of different sizes (from 0.3B to 13B parameters) on two standard BLI benchmarks covering a range of typologically diverse languages. Our work is the first to demonstrate strong BLI capabilities of text-to-text mLLMs. The results reveal that few-shot prompting with in-context examples from nearest neighbours achieves the best performance, establishing new state-of-the-art BLI scores for many language pairs. We also conduct a series of in-depth analyses and ablation studies, providing more insights on BLI with (m)LLMs, also along with their limitations.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

4 samples harvested; 3 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 1 has no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 4 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from cambridgeltl/prompt4bli. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections