Improving Context Usage for Translating Bilingual Customer Support Chat with Large Language Models

Jose Pombal, Sweta Agrawal, André Martins


Abstract
This paper describes Unbabel+IT’s submission to the Chat Shared Task held at the Workshop of Machine Translation 2024. The task focuses on translating customer support chats between agents and customers communicating in different languages. We present two strategies for adapting state-of-the-art language models to better utilize contextual information when translating such conversations. Our training strategy involves finetuning the model on chat datasets with context-augmented instructions, resulting in a specialized model, TOWERCHAT. For inference, we propose a novel quality-aware decoding approach that leverages a context-aware metric, CONTEXTCOMET, to select the optimal translation from a pool of candidates. We evaluate our proposed approach on the official shared task datasets for ten language pairs, showing that our submission consistently outperforms baselines on all and competing systems on 8 out of 10 language pairs across multiple automated metrics. Remarkably, TOWERCHAT outperforms our contrastive submission based on the much larger TOWER-V2-70B model while being 10× smaller. According to human evaluation, our system outperforms all other systems and baselines across all language pairs. These results underscore the importance of context-aware training and inference in handling complex bilingual dialogues.
Anthology ID:
2024.wmt-1.100
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
993–1003
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.100
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jose Pombal, Sweta Agrawal, and André Martins. 2024. Improving Context Usage for Translating Bilingual Customer Support Chat with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 993–1003, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Context Usage for Translating Bilingual Customer Support Chat with Large Language Models (Pombal et al., WMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.100.pdf