Ask HN: Good small LLM model for generating Chinese sentence examples?

3 pointskoynoyno1 comment

I'm trying to find a model which can generate Chinese sentence example for a given word, providing pinyin and English. The model should be small. Ideally 3-4B, definitely not more than 8-9B.

Gemma3 4B sentences are often weird, and pinyin is plain wrong.

GLM-4-0414 9B sentences are way better and pinyin is good, but it's not perfect either.

Llama 3 8B is just bad.

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You might find my LLM translation research useful: https://nuenki.app/blog

Your best bet is probably:

- Produce the sentence with Qwen 3. I didn't test down to 8B, but its 32B variant does reasonably well (see https://nuenki.app/blog/claude_4_is_good_at_translation_but_...) and Chinese models are better at Chinese in general

- Then prompt Qwen 3 again, this time telling it to critique the translation and improve it

LLMs tend to be better at post-critique than generation, though I can't say I've tested with models that small. You may find https://nuenki.app/translator interesting.

You might also be able to use some hideous distil of Deepseek V3?

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