Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models

Hongyuan Lu, Haoran Yang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, Furu Wei


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even if not being trained explicitly for translation. Yet, they still struggle with translating low-resource languages. As supported by our experiments, a bilingual dictionary between the source and the target language could help. Motivated by the fact that multilingual training effectively improves cross-lingual performance, we show that a chained multilingual dictionary with words expressed in more languages can provide more information to better enhance the LLM translation. To this end, we present a novel framework, CoD, Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Experiments indicate that ChatGPT and InstructGPT still have room for improvement in translating many language pairs. And CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x chrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot in-context learning for low-resource languages. Using CoD helps ChatGPT to obviously surpass the SOTA translator NLLB 3.3B.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.55
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
958–976
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.55
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.55
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongyuan Lu, Haoran Yang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, and Furu Wei. 2024. Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 958–976, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models (Lu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.55.pdf