On Creating an English-Thai Code-switched Machine Translation in Medical Domain

Parinthapat Pengpun, Krittamate Tiankanon, Amrest Chinkamol, Jiramet Kinchagawat, Pitchaya Chairuengjitjaras, Pasit Supholkhan, Pubordee Aussavavirojekul, Chiraphat Boonnag, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Hirunkul Phimsiri, Boonthicha Sae-jia, Nattawach Sataudom, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Peerat Limkonchotiwat


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) in the medical domain plays a pivotal role in enhancing healthcare quality and disseminating medical knowledge. Despite advancements in English-Thai MT technology, common MT approaches often underperform in the medical field due to their inability to precisely translate medical terminologies. Our research prioritizes not merely improving translation accuracy but also maintaining medical terminology in English within the translated text through code-switched (CS) translation. We developed a method to produce CS medical translation data, fine-tuned a CS translation model with this data, and evaluated its performance against strong baselines, such as Google Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and GPT-3.5/GPT-4. Our model demonstrated competitive performance in automatic metrics and was highly favored in human preference evaluations. Our evaluation result also shows that medical professionals significantly prefer CS translations that maintain critical English terms accurately, even if it slightly compromises fluency. Our code and test set are publicly available https://github.com/preceptorai-org/NLLB_CS_EM_NLP2024.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.351
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6055–6073
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.351
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parinthapat Pengpun, Krittamate Tiankanon, Amrest Chinkamol, Jiramet Kinchagawat, Pitchaya Chairuengjitjaras, Pasit Supholkhan, Pubordee Aussavavirojekul, Chiraphat Boonnag, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Hirunkul Phimsiri, Boonthicha Sae-jia, Nattawach Sataudom, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, and Peerat Limkonchotiwat. 2024. On Creating an English-Thai Code-switched Machine Translation in Medical Domain. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 6055–6073, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Creating an English-Thai Code-switched Machine Translation in Medical Domain (Pengpun et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.351.pdf