Salute the Classic: Revisiting Challenges of Machine Translation in the Age of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Pang, Jianhui, Ye, Fanghua, Wang, Longyue, Yu, Dian, Wong, Derek F., Shi, Shuming, Tu, Zhaopeng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917867717394432
author Pang, Jianhui
Ye, Fanghua
Wang, Longyue
Yu, Dian
Wong, Derek F.
Shi, Shuming
Tu, Zhaopeng
author_facet Pang, Jianhui
Ye, Fanghua
Wang, Longyue
Yu, Dian
Wong, Derek F.
Shi, Shuming
Tu, Zhaopeng
contents The evolution of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been significantly influenced by six core challenges (Koehn and Knowles, 2017), which have acted as benchmarks for progress in this field. This study revisits these challenges, offering insights into their ongoing relevance in the context of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs): domain mismatch, amount of parallel data, rare word prediction, translation of long sentences, attention model as word alignment, and sub-optimal beam search. Our empirical findings indicate that LLMs effectively lessen the reliance on parallel data for major languages in the pretraining phase. Additionally, the LLM-based translation system significantly enhances the translation of long sentences that contain approximately 80 words and shows the capability to translate documents of up to 512 words. However, despite these significant improvements, the challenges of domain mismatch and prediction of rare words persist. While the challenges of word alignment and beam search, specifically associated with NMT, may not apply to LLMs, we identify three new challenges for LLMs in translation tasks: inference efficiency, translation of low-resource languages in the pretraining phase, and human-aligned evaluation. The datasets and models are released at https://github.com/pangjh3/LLM4MT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_08350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Salute the Classic: Revisiting Challenges of Machine Translation in the Age of Large Language Models
Pang, Jianhui
Ye, Fanghua
Wang, Longyue
Yu, Dian
Wong, Derek F.
Shi, Shuming
Tu, Zhaopeng
Computation and Language
The evolution of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been significantly influenced by six core challenges (Koehn and Knowles, 2017), which have acted as benchmarks for progress in this field. This study revisits these challenges, offering insights into their ongoing relevance in the context of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs): domain mismatch, amount of parallel data, rare word prediction, translation of long sentences, attention model as word alignment, and sub-optimal beam search. Our empirical findings indicate that LLMs effectively lessen the reliance on parallel data for major languages in the pretraining phase. Additionally, the LLM-based translation system significantly enhances the translation of long sentences that contain approximately 80 words and shows the capability to translate documents of up to 512 words. However, despite these significant improvements, the challenges of domain mismatch and prediction of rare words persist. While the challenges of word alignment and beam search, specifically associated with NMT, may not apply to LLMs, we identify three new challenges for LLMs in translation tasks: inference efficiency, translation of low-resource languages in the pretraining phase, and human-aligned evaluation. The datasets and models are released at https://github.com/pangjh3/LLM4MT.
title Salute the Classic: Revisiting Challenges of Machine Translation in the Age of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08350