Machine Translation Hallucination Detection for Low and High Resource Languages using Large Language Models

Kenza Benkirane, Laura Gongas, Shahar Pelles, Naomi Fuchs, Joshua Darmon, Pontus Stenetorp, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Eduardo Sánchez


Abstract
Recent advancements in massively multilingual machine translation systems have significantly enhanced translation accuracy; however, even the best performing systems still generate hallucinations, severely impacting user trust. Detecting hallucinations in Machine Translation (MT) remains a critical challenge, particularly since existing methods excel with High-Resource Languages (HRLs) but exhibit substantial limitations when applied to Low-Resource Languages (LRLs). This paper evaluates sentence-level hallucination detection approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) and semantic similarity within massively multilingual embeddings. Our study spans 16 language directions, covering HRLs, LRLs, with diverse scripts. We find that the choice of model is essential for performance. On average, for HRLs, Llama3-70B outperforms the previous state of the art by as much as 0.16 MCC (Matthews Correlation Coefficient). However, for LRLs we observe that Claude Sonnet outperforms other LLMs on average by 0.03 MCC. The key takeaway from our study is that LLMs can achieve performance comparable or even better than previously proposed models, despite not being explicitly trained for any machine translation task. However, their advantage is less significant for LRLs.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.564
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:
9647–9665
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.564/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.564
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kenza Benkirane, Laura Gongas, Shahar Pelles, Naomi Fuchs, Joshua Darmon, Pontus Stenetorp, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, and Eduardo Sánchez. 2024. Machine Translation Hallucination Detection for Low and High Resource Languages using Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9647–9665, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Translation Hallucination Detection for Low and High Resource Languages using Large Language Models (Benkirane et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.564.pdf
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 2024.findings-emnlp.564.data.zip