The digital exclusion of endangered languages remains a critical challenge in NLP, limiting both linguistic research and revitalization efforts. This study introduces the first computational investigation of Comanche, an Uto-Aztecan language on the verge of extinction, demonstrating how minimal-cost, community-informed NLP interventions can support language preservation. We present a manually curated dataset of 412 phrases, a synthetic data generation pipeline, and an empirical evaluation of GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini for language identification. Our experiments reveal that while LLMs struggle with Comanche in zero-shot settings, few-shot prompting significantly improves performance, achieving near-perfect accuracy with just five examples. Our findings highlight the potential of targeted NLP methodologies in low-resource contexts and emphasize that visibility is the first step toward inclusion. By establishing a foundation for Comanche in NLP, we advocate for computational approaches that prioritize accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and community engagement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with tool use and APIs improve task performance but often misuse them, leading to inefficiency and unnecessary cost. We propose Self Knowledge-Tracing for Tool Use (SKT-Tool), a method enabling LLMs to assess their capabilities and make informed API usage decisions using knowledge tracing (KT). Our teacher-student framework helps LLMs optimize API calls in real-time without fine-tuning. Experiments across multiple datasets show that SKT-Tool significantly reduces API calls while maintaining accuracy, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution for tool-augmented LLMs. We conclude by analyzing shortcomings in this method and identifying directions for future work.

Prompting methods for language models, such as Chain-of-thought (CoT), present intuitive step-by-step processes for problem solving. These methodologies aim to equip models with a better understanding of the correct procedures for addressing a given task. Despite these advancements, CoT lacks the ability of reflection and error correction, potentially causing a model to perpetuate mistakes and errors. Therefore, inspired by the human ability for said tasks, we propose Error Reflection Prompting (ERP) to further enhance reasoning in language models. Building upon CoT, ERP is a method comprised of an incorrect answer, error recognition, and a correct answer. This process enables the model to recognize types of errors and the steps that lead to incorrect answers, allowing the model to better discern which steps to avoid and which to take. The model is able to generate the error outlines itself with automated ERP generation, allowing for error recognition and correction to be integrated into the reasoning chain and produce scalability and reliability in the process. The results demonstrate that ERP serves as a versatile supplement to conventional CoT, ultimately contributing to more robust and capable reasoning abilities along with increased interpretability in how models ultimately reach their errors.

Translating idiomatic expressions remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs), as they often produce literal, semantically incorrect translations—for instance, directly converting “break a leg” into a nonsensical phrase in the target language. While external resources like IdiomKB can supply the figurative meaning and thus yield semantically accurate translations, this approach does not preserve the cultural and stylistic nuances that make idioms so distinctive. Our study focuses on idiomatic translations across multiple languages, including Chinese (ZH), Urdu (UR), and Hindi (HI), with clearly defined abbreviations for each. We propose two methods for improving idiomatic translation fidelity: a Semantic Idiom Alignment (SIA) approach that uses pre-trained sentence embeddings to identify target-language idioms, and a Language-Model-based Idiom Alignment (LIA) approach that prompts an LLM to suggest appropriate idiom counterparts. Human evaluations across multiple language pairs show that SIA better preserves idiomatic style. To support this work, we introduce idiom datasets in low-resource languages (Urdu and Hindi). Our results indicate that aligning idioms at the semantic level can improve cross-lingual style preservation and cultural authenticity.

Although LLMs have the potential to transform many fields, they still underperform humans in reasoning tasks. Existing methods induce the model to produce step-by-step calculations, but this research explores the question: Does making the LLM analyze the question improve its performance? We propose a novel prompting strategy called Question Analysis Prompting (QAP), in which the model is prompted to explain the question in ’n’ words before solving. The value of ’n’ influences the length of response generated by the model. QAP is evaluated on GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 Turbo on arithmetic datasets GSM8K, AQuA, and SAT and commonsense dataset StrategyQA. QAP is compared with other state-of-the-art prompts including chain-of-thought (CoT), Plan and Solve Prompting (PS+) and Take A Deep Breath (TADB). QAP outperforms all state-of-the-art prompts on AQuA and SAT datasets on both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. QAP consistently ranks among the top-2 prompts on 75% of the tests. A key factor of QAP performance can be attributed to response length, where detailed responses are beneficial when answering harder questions, but can negatively affect easy questions.

Certain abilities of Transformer-based language models consistently emerge in their later layers. Previous research has leveraged this phenomenon to improve factual accuracy through self-contrast, penalizing early-exit predictions based on the premise that later-layer updates are more factually reliable than earlier-layer associations. We observe a similar pattern for fine-grained emotion classification in text, demonstrating that self-contrast can enhance encoder-based text classifiers. Additionally, we reinterpret self-contrast as a form of linear extrapolation, which motivates a refined approach that dynamically adjusts the contrastive strength based on the selected intermediate layer. Experiments across multiple models and emotion classification datasets show that our method outperforms standard classification techniques in fine-grained emotion classification tasks.