Eliciting the Translation Ability of Large Language Models via Multilingual Finetuning with Translation Instructions

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Jiahuan, Zhou, Hao, Huang, Shujian, Cheng, Shanbo, Chen, Jiajun
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Li, Jiahuan
Zhou, Hao
Huang, Shujian
Cheng, Shanbo
Chen, Jiajun
author_facet Li, Jiahuan
Zhou, Hao
Huang, Shujian
Cheng, Shanbo
Chen, Jiajun
contents Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown strong abilities in multilingual translations, without being explicitly trained on parallel corpora. It is interesting how the LLMs obtain their ability to carry out translation instructions for different languages. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis by finetuning a multilingual pretrained language model, XGLM-7B, to perform multilingual translation following given instructions. Firstly, we show that multilingual LLMs have stronger translation abilities than previously demonstrated. For a certain language, the performance depends on its similarity to English and the amount of data used in the pretraining phase. Secondly, we find that LLMs' ability to carry out translation instructions relies on the understanding of translation instructions and the alignment among different languages. With multilingual finetuning, LLMs could learn to perform the translation task well even for those language pairs unseen during the instruction tuning phase.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_15083
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Eliciting the Translation Ability of Large Language Models via Multilingual Finetuning with Translation Instructions
Li, Jiahuan
Zhou, Hao
Huang, Shujian
Cheng, Shanbo
Chen, Jiajun
Computation and Language
Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown strong abilities in multilingual translations, without being explicitly trained on parallel corpora. It is interesting how the LLMs obtain their ability to carry out translation instructions for different languages. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis by finetuning a multilingual pretrained language model, XGLM-7B, to perform multilingual translation following given instructions. Firstly, we show that multilingual LLMs have stronger translation abilities than previously demonstrated. For a certain language, the performance depends on its similarity to English and the amount of data used in the pretraining phase. Secondly, we find that LLMs' ability to carry out translation instructions relies on the understanding of translation instructions and the alignment among different languages. With multilingual finetuning, LLMs could learn to perform the translation task well even for those language pairs unseen during the instruction tuning phase.
title Eliciting the Translation Ability of Large Language Models via Multilingual Finetuning with Translation Instructions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15083