Instruction-tuned Large Language Models for Machine Translation in the Medical Domain

Miguel Rios


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results on machine translation for high resource language pairs and domains. However, in specialised domains (e.g. medical) LLMs have shown lower performance compared to standard neural machine translation models. The consistency in the machine translation of terminology is crucial for users, researchers, and translators in specialised domains. In this study, we compare the performance between baseline LLMs and instruction-tuned LLMs in the medical domain. In addition, we introduce terminology from specialised medical dictionaries into the instruction formatted datasets for fine-tuning LLMs. The instruction-tuned LLMs significantly outperform the baseline models with automatic metrics. Moreover, the instruction-tuned LLMs produce fewer errors compared to the baseline based on automatic error annotation.
Anthology ID:
2025.mtsummit-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1
Month:
June
Year:
2025
Address:
Geneva, Switzerland
Editors:
Pierrette Bouillon, Johanna Gerlach, Sabrina Girletti, Lise Volkart, Raphael Rubino, Rico Sennrich, Ana C. Farinha, Marco Gaido, Joke Daems, Dorothy Kenny, Helena Moniz, Sara Szoc
Venue:
MTSummit
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
162–172
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-1.13/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miguel Rios. 2025. Instruction-tuned Large Language Models for Machine Translation in the Medical Domain. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1, pages 162–172, Geneva, Switzerland. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models for Machine Translation in the Medical Domain (Rios, MTSummit 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-1.13.pdf