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Estonian WinoGrande Dataset: Comparative Analysis of LLM Performance on Human and Machine Translation

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)

DOI:10.63317/27gw7fzp2jbx

Abstract

In this paper, we present a localized and culturally adapted Estonian translation of the test set from the widely used commonsense reasoning benchmark, WinoGrande. We detail the translation and adaptation process carried out by translation specialists and evaluate the performance of both proprietary and open source models on the human translated benchmark. Additionally, we explore the feasibility of achieving high-quality machine translation by incorporating insights from the manual translation process into the design of a detailed prompt. This prompt is specifically tailored to address both the linguistic characteristics of Estonian and the unique translation challenges posed by the WinoGrande dataset. Our findings show that model performance on the human translated Estonian dataset is slightly lower than on the original English test set, while performance on machine-translated data is notably worse. Additionally, our experiments indicate that prompt engineering offers limited improvement in translation quality or model accuracy, and highlight the importance of involving language specialists in dataset translation and adaptation to ensure reliable and interpretable evaluations of language competency and reasoning in large language models.

Details

Paper ID
lrec2026-main-549
Pages
pp. 6904-6918
BibKey
ojastu-etal-2026-estonian
Editor
N/A
Publisher
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
ISSN
2522-2686
ISBN
978-2-493814-49-4
Conference
The Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)
Location
Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Date
11 May 2026 16 May 2026

Authors

  • MO

    Marii Ojastu

  • HK

    Hele-Andra Kuulmets

  • AD

    Aleksei Dorkin

  • MB

    Marika Borovikova

  • DS

    Dage Särg

  • KS

    Kairit Sirts

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