Learning-From-Mistakes Prompting for Indigenous Language Translation

You Cheng Liao, Chen-Jui Yu, Chi-Yi Lin, He-Feng Yun, Yen-Hsiang Wang, Hsiao-Min Li, Yao-Chung Fan


Abstract
Using large language models, this paper presents techniques to improve extremely low-resourced indigenous language translations. Our approaches are grounded in the use of (1) the presence of a datastore consisting of a limited number of parallel translation examples, (2) the inherent capabilities of LLMs like GPT-3.5, and (3) a word-level translation dictionary. We harness the potential of LLMs and in-context learning techniques in such a setting for using LLM as universal translators for extremely low-resourced languages. Our methodology hinges on utilizing LLMs as language compilers for selected language pairs, hypothesizing that they could internalize syntactic structures to facilitate accurate translation. We introduce three techniques: KNN-Prompting with Retrieved Prompting Context, Chain-of-Thought Prompting, and Learning-from-Mistakes Prompting, with the last method addressing past errors. The evaluation results suggest that, even with limited corpora, LLMs, when paired with proper prompting, can effectively translate extremely low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.loresmt-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Chao-hong Liu, Ekaterina Vylomova, Flammie Pirinen, Jade Abbott, Jonathan Washington, Nathaniel Oco, Valentin Malykh, Varvara Logacheva, Xiaobing Zhao
Venues:
LoResMT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
146–158
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
You Cheng Liao, Chen-Jui Yu, Chi-Yi Lin, He-Feng Yun, Yen-Hsiang Wang, Hsiao-Min Li, and Yao-Chung Fan. 2024. Learning-From-Mistakes Prompting for Indigenous Language Translation. In Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024), pages 146–158, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning-From-Mistakes Prompting for Indigenous Language Translation (Liao et al., LoResMT-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.15.pdf