MTUncertainty: Assessing the Need for Post-editing of Machine Translation Outputs by Fine-tuning OpenAI LLMs

Serge Gladkoff, Lifeng Han, Gleb Erofeev, Irina Sorokina, Goran Nenadic


Abstract
Translation Quality Evaluation (TQE) is an essential step of the modern translation production process. TQE is critical in assessing both machine translation (MT) and human translation (HT) quality without reference translations. The ability to evaluate or even simply estimate the quality of translation automatically may open significant efficiency gains through process optimisation.This work examines whether the state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can be used for this uncertainty estimation of MT output quality. We take OpenAI models as an example technology and approach TQE as a binary classification task.On eight language pairs including English to Italian, German, French, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, and Chinese, our experimental results show that fine-tuned gpt3.5 can demonstrate good performance on translation quality prediction tasks, i.e. whether the translation needs to be edited.Another finding is that simply increasing the sizes of LLMs does not lead to apparent better performances on this task by comparing the performance of three different versions of OpenAI models: curie, davinci, and gpt3.5 with 13B, 175B, and 175B parameters, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2024.eamt-1.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Sheffield, UK
Editors:
Carolina Scarton, Charlotte Prescott, Chris Bayliss, Chris Oakley, Joanna Wright, Stuart Wrigley, Xingyi Song, Edward Gow-Smith, Rachel Bawden, Víctor M Sánchez-Cartagena, Patrick Cadwell, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Vera Cabarrão, Konstantinos Chatzitheodorou, Mary Nurminen, Diptesh Kanojia, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Note:
Pages:
337–346
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.29
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Serge Gladkoff, Lifeng Han, Gleb Erofeev, Irina Sorokina, and Goran Nenadic. 2024. MTUncertainty: Assessing the Need for Post-editing of Machine Translation Outputs by Fine-tuning OpenAI LLMs. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 337–346, Sheffield, UK. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
MTUncertainty: Assessing the Need for Post-editing of Machine Translation Outputs by Fine-tuning OpenAI LLMs (Gladkoff et al., EAMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.29.pdf