SAGA: Score-Weighted Adaptive Generation Alignment for Low-Resource Nordic Language Models
2608.06179

Authors

Andreas Bueff,Hafsteinn Einarsson,Fredrik Heintz,Hoda Fakharzadehjahromy,Emil Wiman

Abstract

Preference optimisation has proven effective for improving large language models but typically relies on costly human preference annotations. Extending these methods to morphologically rich, low-resource languages remains challenging because such annotations are scarce.

We present SAGA (Score-weighted Adaptive Generation Alignment), a parser-guided preference optimisation framework that replaces human labels with dependency-parser supervision. SAGA converts parser judgements into preference pairs for delta-DPO, combines parser quality with lexical diversity in a composite reward, filters low-information pairs using a reward-gap criterion, and monitors reward hacking to maintain reliable supervision.

Across Danish, Icelandic, and Norwegian Bokmål using GPT-SW3-1.3B, SAGA consistently improves grammatical quality without requiring human preference labels. Danish parse success increases from 69.0% to 93.8%, Icelandic achieves a +4.5 percentage-point improvement on an independent Stanza evaluation (three-run mean +3.3 percentage points) while native speakers prefer SAGA outputs in 80% of pairwise comparisons, and Norwegian Bokmål improves by +28 percentage points.

These results demonstrate that parser-derived supervision is a practical alternative to human preference annotation for grammatical alignment in low-resource languages where high-quality dependency parsers are available.

Resources

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