Panahi, Solmaz, Kelleher, John D. and Nedumpozhimana, Vasudevan (2026) SynthLLM: An LLM-based Scalable Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline for Low-Resource Languages. In: LREC 2026, 11-16 May 2026, Spain.
Preview
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike.
Download (2MB) | Preview
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled scalable synthetic data generation, yet their effective adaptation to
low-resource languages remains underexplored. We introduce an LLM-based generate and annotate paradigm to
create synthetic datasets for low-resource NLP classification tasks. The framework employs a smaller model for text
generation and a stronger model for automatic annotation. Using Farsi Natural Language Inference (NLI) as a case
study, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset of 100,000 labeled instances. We provide a systematic empirical
analysis of annotation quality, label-distribution effects, and training regimes. We compare GPT-4o-mini, Aya-23-35B,
and DeBERTa as annotators and examine how annotation variability propagates to downstream performance.
Our results show that a warm-up phase with synthetic data consistently outperforms data mixing and reversed
ordering. Notably, open-source annotation (Aya-23-35B) achieves comparable downstream performance to the
proprietary model (GPT-4o-mini), with significant cost implications for deploying pipelines in low-resource settings.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Synthetic data; LLM-as-annotator; Low-resource; |
| Academic Unit: | Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute |
| Item ID: | 21336 |
| Depositing User: | IR Editor |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Mar 2026 11:55 |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Related URLs: | |
| Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Share and Export
Share and Export