ParroT: Translating during Chat using Large Language Models tuned with Human Translation and Feedback

Wenxiang Jiao, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Zhiwei He, Tian Liang, Xing Wang, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have exhibited remarkable abilities on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including various machine translation abilities accomplished during chat. However, these models are only accessible through restricted APIs, which creates barriers to new research and advancements in the field. Therefore, we propose ParroT, a framework to enhance and regulate the translation abilities during chat based on open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA), human-written translation and feedback data. Specifically, ParroT reformulates translation data into the instruction-following style, and introduces a “Hint” field for incorporating extra requirements to regulate the translation process. Accordingly, we propose three instruction types for finetuning ParroT models, including translation instruction, contrastive instruction, and error-guided instruction. Experiments on Flores subsets and WMT22 test sets suggest that translation instruction improves the translation performance of vanilla LLMs significantly while error-guided instruction can lead to further improvement, which demonstrates the importance of learning from low-quality translations annotated by humans. We also demonstrate the potential of automatic evaluation tools in providing quality information of translations, when constructing error-guided instructions for directions that lack human annotation data. Please refer to our Github project for more implementation details: https://github.com/wxjiao/ParroT.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1001
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15009–15020
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1001
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1001
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenxiang Jiao, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Zhiwei He, Tian Liang, Xing Wang, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. 2023. ParroT: Translating during Chat using Large Language Models tuned with Human Translation and Feedback. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15009–15020, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ParroT: Translating during Chat using Large Language Models tuned with Human Translation and Feedback (Jiao et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1001.pdf