RAMP: Retrieval and Attribute-Marking Enhanced Prompting for Attribute-Controlled Translation

Gabriele Sarti, Phu Mon Htut, Xing Niu, Benjamin Hsu, Anna Currey, Georgiana Dinu, Maria Nadejde


Abstract
Attribute-controlled translation (ACT) is a subtask of machine translation that involves controlling stylistic or linguistic attributes (like formality and gender) of translation outputs. While ACT has garnered attention in recent years due to its usefulness in real-world applications, progress in the task is currently limited by dataset availability, since most prior approaches rely on supervised methods. To address this limitation, we propose Retrieval and Attribute-Marking enhanced Prompting (RAMP), which leverages large multilingual language models to perform ACT in few-shot and zero-shot settings. RAMP improves generation accuracy over the standard prompting approach by (1) incorporating a semantic similarity retrieval component for selecting similar in-context examples, and (2) marking in-context examples with attribute annotations. Our comprehensive experiments show that RAMP is a viable approach in both zero-shot and few-shot settings.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.126
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1476–1490
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.126
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.126
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gabriele Sarti, Phu Mon Htut, Xing Niu, Benjamin Hsu, Anna Currey, Georgiana Dinu, and Maria Nadejde. 2023. RAMP: Retrieval and Attribute-Marking Enhanced Prompting for Attribute-Controlled Translation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1476–1490, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RAMP: Retrieval and Attribute-Marking Enhanced Prompting for Attribute-Controlled Translation (Sarti et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.126.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.126.mp4