Word Alignment as Preference for Machine Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wu, Qiyu, Nagata, Masaaki, Miao, Zhongtao, Tsuruoka, Yoshimasa
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wu, Qiyu
Nagata, Masaaki
Miao, Zhongtao
Tsuruoka, Yoshimasa
author_facet Wu, Qiyu
Nagata, Masaaki
Miao, Zhongtao
Tsuruoka, Yoshimasa
contents The problem of hallucination and omission, a long-standing problem in machine translation (MT), is more pronounced when a large language model (LLM) is used in MT because an LLM itself is susceptible to these phenomena. In this work, we mitigate the problem in an LLM-based MT model by guiding it to better word alignment. We first study the correlation between word alignment and the phenomena of hallucination and omission in MT. Then we propose to utilize word alignment as preference to optimize the LLM-based MT model. The preference data are constructed by selecting chosen and rejected translations from multiple MT tools. Subsequently, direct preference optimization is used to optimize the LLM-based model towards the preference signal. Given the absence of evaluators specifically designed for hallucination and omission in MT, we further propose selecting hard instances and utilizing GPT-4 to directly evaluate the performance of the models in mitigating these issues. We verify the rationality of these designed evaluation methods by experiments, followed by extensive results demonstrating the effectiveness of word alignment-based preference optimization to mitigate hallucination and omission. On the other hand, although it shows promise in mitigating hallucination and omission, the overall performance of MT in different language directions remains mixed, with slight increases in BLEU and decreases in COMET.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_09223
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Word Alignment as Preference for Machine Translation
Wu, Qiyu
Nagata, Masaaki
Miao, Zhongtao
Tsuruoka, Yoshimasa
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The problem of hallucination and omission, a long-standing problem in machine translation (MT), is more pronounced when a large language model (LLM) is used in MT because an LLM itself is susceptible to these phenomena. In this work, we mitigate the problem in an LLM-based MT model by guiding it to better word alignment. We first study the correlation between word alignment and the phenomena of hallucination and omission in MT. Then we propose to utilize word alignment as preference to optimize the LLM-based MT model. The preference data are constructed by selecting chosen and rejected translations from multiple MT tools. Subsequently, direct preference optimization is used to optimize the LLM-based model towards the preference signal. Given the absence of evaluators specifically designed for hallucination and omission in MT, we further propose selecting hard instances and utilizing GPT-4 to directly evaluate the performance of the models in mitigating these issues. We verify the rationality of these designed evaluation methods by experiments, followed by extensive results demonstrating the effectiveness of word alignment-based preference optimization to mitigate hallucination and omission. On the other hand, although it shows promise in mitigating hallucination and omission, the overall performance of MT in different language directions remains mixed, with slight increases in BLEU and decreases in COMET.
title Word Alignment as Preference for Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09223