POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Liang Ding, Haoqi Zheng, Zhen Huang, Zhihua Wen, Dongsheng Li


Abstract
Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation (NMT) due to limited parallel data, prompting research in unsupervised NMT.Unsupervised NMT (UNMT), without requiring ground truth, provides solutions for LRL translations using synthetic pseudo-parallel data and parallel data from auxiliary language pairs. However, they usually encounter translation errors, including errors from synthetic data and from auxiliary language pairs with linguistic biases.We argue that large language models (LLMs) mitigate UNMT’s translation errors by dynamically organizing auxiliary languages in prompts to improve LRL translations. In this paper, we propose PrObability-driven Meta-graph Prompter (POMP), an approach employing a dynamic graph to organize multiple auxiliary languages, to prompt LLMs in LRL translations. POMP proposes a language-specific meta-graph that dynamically samples multiple translation paths to organize auxiliary languages in constructing prompts. Following the path, POMP prompts LLMs to translate with a mixture of auxiliary languages. We achieve the meta-graph’s evolution by back-propagating evaluation scores to update probabilities on the graph.Our experimental improvements show POMP’s effectiveness on LRLs’ translation.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.537
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9976–9992
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.537
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.537
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Liang Ding, Haoqi Zheng, Zhen Huang, Zhihua Wen, and Dongsheng Li. 2024. POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9976–9992, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (Pan et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/autopr/2024.acl-long.537.pdf