Leveraging GPT-4 for Automatic Translation Post-Editing

Vikas Raunak, Amr Sharaf, Yiren Wang, Hany Awadalla, Arul Menezes


Abstract
While Neural Machine Translation (NMT) represents the leading approach to Machine Translation (MT), the outputs of NMT models still require translation post-editing to rectify errors and enhance quality under critical settings. In this work, we formalize the task of direct translation post-editing with Large Language Models (LLMs) and explore the use of GPT-4 to automatically post-edit NMT outputs across several language pairs. Our results demonstrate that GPT-4 is adept at translation post-editing, producing meaningful and trustworthy edits to translations that help improve its general quality as well as remove different classes of major errors in translations. In particular, human evaluations on assessing edit trustworthiness show that GPT-4 exhibits a large improvement over the prior state-of-the-art LLM. Notably, we improve upon state-of-the-art performance on WMT-22 English-Chinese, English-German, Chinese-English and German-English language pairs using GPT-4 based post-editing, as evaluated by state-of-the-art MT quality metrics. However, we also show that GPT-4 could produce hallucinated edits, thereby urging caution in its use as an expert translation post-editor.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.804
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:
12009–12024
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.804
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.804
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vikas Raunak, Amr Sharaf, Yiren Wang, Hany Awadalla, and Arul Menezes. 2023. Leveraging GPT-4 for Automatic Translation Post-Editing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 12009–12024, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging GPT-4 for Automatic Translation Post-Editing (Raunak et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.804.pdf