LLMs Are Zero-Shot Context-Aware Simultaneous Translators

Roman Koshkin, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura


Abstract
The advent of transformers has fueled progress in machine translation. More recently large language models (LLMs) have come to the spotlight thanks to their generality and strong performance in a wide range of language tasks, including translation. Here we show that open-source LLMs perform on par with or better than some state-of-the-art baselines in simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) tasks, zero-shot. We also demonstrate that injection of minimal background information, which is easy with an LLM, brings further performance gains, especially on challenging technical subject-matter. This highlights LLMs’ potential for building next generation of massively multilingual, context-aware and terminologically accurate SiMT systems that require no resource-intensive training or fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.69
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:
1192–1207
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.69
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Roman Koshkin, Katsuhito Sudoh, and Satoshi Nakamura. 2024. LLMs Are Zero-Shot Context-Aware Simultaneous Translators. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1192–1207, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLMs Are Zero-Shot Context-Aware Simultaneous Translators (Koshkin et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.69.pdf