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Abstract - Do LLMs Know What Luxembourgish Borrows? Probing Lexical Neology in Low-Resource Multilingual Models
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for writing assistance in small contact languages, yet it is unclear whether they respect community norms around lexical borrowing and neology. We introduce LexNeo-Bench, a 3{,}050-instance token-level benchmark derived from LuxBorrow, a large-scale Luxembourgish news corpus, where target tokens are labelled as native or as French, German, or English borrowings. Using this benchmark, we probe three multilingual LLMs across 34 prompt settings on two tasks: borrowing type classification and a binary lexical-innovation proxy (borrowing versus native). Without external context, models perform only slightly above chance on borrowing classification, so we construct a linguistic knowledge graph that encodes donor language, morphological patterns, and lexical analogues, and inject instance-specific subgraphs into the prompt. Knowledge-graph prompts raise borrowing classification accuracy from 25 -- 35\% up to 71 -- 81\% and largely close the gap between small and large models, while leaving neology detection difficult and sensitive to few-shot design. Our results show that lexicon-aware prompting is highly beneficial for robust borrowing judgments in low-resource contact languages and that lexical resources can serve as structured context for LLM evaluation. This study was carried out within the ENEOLI COST Action and examines borrowing as a form of lexical innovation in multilingual Luxembourgish data.
大语言模型是否了解卢森堡语的借词?——探针法评测低资源多语言模型中的词汇新词现象 /
Do LLMs Know What Luxembourgish Borrows? Probing Lexical Neology in Low-Resource Multilingual Models
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文通过构建一个基于卢森堡语新闻语料的借词基准数据集LexNeo-Bench,测试了多种多语言大模型识别外来词的能力,发现直接提问时模型表现较差,而引入包含源语言、构词模式等信息的语言知识图谱后,借词分类准确率大幅提升至71-81%,但识别创新性新词仍然困难。