Xiangwen Zhang


2022

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MSP: Multi-Stage Prompting for Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Translators
Zhixing Tan | Xiangwen Zhang | Shuo Wang | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Prompting has recently been shown as a promising approach for applying pre-trained language models to perform downstream tasks. We present Multi-Stage Prompting, a simple and automatic approach for leveraging pre-trained language models to translation tasks. To better mitigate the discrepancy between pre-training and translation, MSP divides the translation process via pre-trained language models into three separate stages: the encoding stage, the re-encoding stage, and the decoding stage. During each stage, we independently apply different continuous prompts for allowing pre-trained language models better shift to translation tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on three translation tasks. Experiments show that our method can significantly improve the translation performance of pre-trained language models.