Retrieving Examples from Memory for Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation: A Systematic Comparison

Maxime Bouthors, Josep Crego, François Yvon


Abstract
Retrieval-Augmented Neural Machine Translation (RAMT) architectures retrieve examples from memory to guide the generation process. While most works in this trend explore new ways to exploit the retrieved examples, the upstream retrieval step is mostly unexplored. In this paper, we study the effect of varying retrieval methods for several translation architectures to better understand the interplay between these two processes.We conduct experiments in two language pairs in a multi-domain setting and consider several downstream architectures based on a standard autoregressive model, an edit-based model, and a large language model with in-context learning. Our experiments show that the choice of the retrieval technique impacts the translation scores, with variance across architectures. We also discuss the effects of increasing the number and diversity of examples, which are mostly positive across the board.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.190
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3022–3039
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.190
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maxime Bouthors, Josep Crego, and François Yvon. 2024. Retrieving Examples from Memory for Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation: A Systematic Comparison. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 3022–3039, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieving Examples from Memory for Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation: A Systematic Comparison (Bouthors et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.190.pdf
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