Self-Augmented In-Context Learning for Unsupervised Word Translation

Yaoyiran Li, Anna Korhonen, Ivan Vulić


Abstract
Recent work has shown that, while large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong word translation or bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) capabilities in few-shot setups, they still cannot match the performance of ‘traditional’ mapping-based approaches in the unsupervised scenario where no seed translation pairs are available, especially for lower-resource languages. To address this challenge with LLMs, we propose self-augmented in-context learning (SAIL) for unsupervised BLI: starting from a zero-shot prompt, SAIL iteratively induces a set of high-confidence word translation pairs for in-context learning (ICL) from an LLM, which it then reapplies to the same LLM in the ICL fashion. Our method shows substantial gains over zero-shot prompting of LLMs on two established BLI benchmarks spanning a wide range of language pairs, also outperforming mapping-based baselines across the board. In addition to achieving state-of-the-art unsupervised BLI performance, we also conduct comprehensive analyses on SAIL and discuss its limitations.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-short.67
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
743–753
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.67
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yaoyiran Li, Anna Korhonen, and Ivan Vulić. 2024. Self-Augmented In-Context Learning for Unsupervised Word Translation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 743–753, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-Augmented In-Context Learning for Unsupervised Word Translation (Li et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.67.pdf