Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 have emerged as general-purpose language models capable of addressing many natural language generation or understanding tasks. On the task of Machine Translation (MT), multiple works have investigated few-shot prompting mechanisms to elicit better translations from LLMs. However, there has been relatively little investigation on how such translations differ qualitatively from the translations generated by standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. In this work, we investigate these differences in terms of the literalness of translations produced by the two systems. Using literalness measures involving word alignment and monotonicity, we find that translations out of English (E-X) from GPTs tend to be less literal, while exhibiting similar or better scores on MT quality metrics. We demonstrate that this finding is borne out in human evaluations as well. We then show that these differences are especially pronounced when translating sentences that contain idiomatic expressions.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-short.90
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1041–1050
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.90
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.90
- Cite (ACL):
- Vikas Raunak, Arul Menezes, Matt Post, and Hany Hassan. 2023. Do GPTs Produce Less Literal Translations?. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1041–1050, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Do GPTs Produce Less Literal Translations? (Raunak et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.acl-short.90.pdf