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