Modeling User Preferences with Automatic Metrics: Creating a High-Quality Preference Dataset for Machine Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Agrawal, Sweta, de Souza, José G. C., Rei, Ricardo, Farinhas, António, Faria, Gonçalo, Fernandes, Patrick, Guerreiro, Nuno M, Martins, Andre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866912067520299008
author Agrawal, Sweta
de Souza, José G. C.
Rei, Ricardo
Farinhas, António
Faria, Gonçalo
Fernandes, Patrick
Guerreiro, Nuno M
Martins, Andre
author_facet Agrawal, Sweta
de Souza, José G. C.
Rei, Ricardo
Farinhas, António
Faria, Gonçalo
Fernandes, Patrick
Guerreiro, Nuno M
Martins, Andre
contents Alignment with human preferences is an important step in developing accurate and safe large language models. This is no exception in machine translation (MT), where better handling of language nuances and context-specific variations leads to improved quality. However, preference data based on human feedback can be very expensive to obtain and curate at a large scale. Automatic metrics, on the other hand, can induce preferences, but they might not match human expectations perfectly. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages the best of both worlds. We first collect sentence-level quality assessments from professional linguists on translations generated by multiple high-quality MT systems and evaluate the ability of current automatic metrics to recover these preferences. We then use this analysis to curate a new dataset, MT-Pref (metric induced translation preference) dataset, which comprises 18k instances covering 18 language directions, using texts sourced from multiple domains post-2022. We show that aligning TOWER models on MT-Pref significantly improves translation quality on WMT23 and FLORES benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07779
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling User Preferences with Automatic Metrics: Creating a High-Quality Preference Dataset for Machine Translation
Agrawal, Sweta
de Souza, José G. C.
Rei, Ricardo
Farinhas, António
Faria, Gonçalo
Fernandes, Patrick
Guerreiro, Nuno M
Martins, Andre
Computation and Language
Alignment with human preferences is an important step in developing accurate and safe large language models. This is no exception in machine translation (MT), where better handling of language nuances and context-specific variations leads to improved quality. However, preference data based on human feedback can be very expensive to obtain and curate at a large scale. Automatic metrics, on the other hand, can induce preferences, but they might not match human expectations perfectly. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages the best of both worlds. We first collect sentence-level quality assessments from professional linguists on translations generated by multiple high-quality MT systems and evaluate the ability of current automatic metrics to recover these preferences. We then use this analysis to curate a new dataset, MT-Pref (metric induced translation preference) dataset, which comprises 18k instances covering 18 language directions, using texts sourced from multiple domains post-2022. We show that aligning TOWER models on MT-Pref significantly improves translation quality on WMT23 and FLORES benchmarks.
title Modeling User Preferences with Automatic Metrics: Creating a High-Quality Preference Dataset for Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07779