Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs

Simone Conia, Daniel Lee, Min Li, Umar Farooq Minhas, Saloni Potdar, Yunyao Li


Abstract
Translating text that contains entity names is a challenging task, as cultural-related references can vary significantly across languages. These variations may also be caused by transcreation, an adaptation process that entails more than transliteration and word-for-word translation. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-cultural translation on two fronts: (i) we introduce XC-Translate, the first large-scale, manually-created benchmark for machine translation that focuses on text that contains potentially culturally-nuanced entity names, and (ii) we propose KG-MT, a novel end-to-end method to integrate information from a multilingual knowledge graph into a neural machine translation model by leveraging a dense retrieval mechanism. Our experiments and analyses show that current machine translation systems and large language models still struggle to translate texts containing entity names, whereas KG-MT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin, obtaining a 129% and 62% relative improvement compared to NLLB-200 and GPT-4, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.914
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:
16343–16360
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.914
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simone Conia, Daniel Lee, Min Li, Umar Farooq Minhas, Saloni Potdar, and Yunyao Li. 2024. Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16343–16360, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs (Conia et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.914.pdf