Empirical Assessment of kNN-MT for Real-World Translation Scenarios
Pedro Henrique Martins, João Alves, Tânia Vaz, Madalena Gonçalves, Beatriz Silva, Marianna Buchicchio, José G. C. de Souza, André F. T. Martins
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of the k-Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation model (kNN-MT) in real-world scenarios. kNN-MT is a retrieval-augmented framework that combines the advantages of parametric models with non-parametric datastores built using a set of parallel sentences. Previous studies have primarily focused on evaluating the model using only the BLEU metric and have not tested kNN-MT in real world scenarios. Our study aims to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis on various datasets comprising different language pairs and different domains, using multiple automatic metrics and expert evaluated Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). We compare kNN-MT with two alternate strategies: fine-tuning all the model parameters and adapter-based finetuning. Finally, we analyze the effect of the datastore size on translation quality, and we examine the number of entries necessary to bootstrap and configure the index.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eamt-1.12
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tampere, Finland
- Editors:
- Mary Nurminen, Judith Brenner, Maarit Koponen, Sirkku Latomaa, Mikhail Mikhailov, Frederike Schierl, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Eva Vanmassenhove, Sergi Alvarez Vidal, Nora Aranberri, Mara Nunziatini, Carla Parra Escartín, Mikel Forcada, Maja Popovic, Carolina Scarton, Helena Moniz
- Venue:
- EAMT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Association for Machine Translation
- Note:
- Pages:
- 115–124
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.12
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Pedro Henrique Martins, João Alves, Tânia Vaz, Madalena Gonçalves, Beatriz Silva, Marianna Buchicchio, José G. C. de Souza, and André F. T. Martins. 2023. Empirical Assessment of kNN-MT for Real-World Translation Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 115–124, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
- Cite (Informal):
- Empirical Assessment of kNN-MT for Real-World Translation Scenarios (Martins et al., EAMT 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2023.eamt-1.12.pdf