Abstract
The NLP community recently saw the release of a new large open-access multilingual language model, BLOOM (BigScience et al., 2022) covering 46 languages. We focus on BLOOM’s multilingual ability by evaluating its machine translation performance across several datasets (WMT, Flores-101 and DiaBLa) and language pairs (high- and low-resourced). Our results show that 0-shot performance suffers from overgeneration and generating in the wrong language, but this is greatly improved in the few-shot setting, with very good results for a number of language pairs. We study several aspects including prompt design, model sizes, cross-lingual transfer and the use of discursive context.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eamt-1.16
- 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:
- 157–170
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.16
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Rachel Bawden and François Yvon. 2023. Investigating the Translation Performance of a Large Multilingual Language Model: the Case of BLOOM. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 157–170, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
- Cite (Informal):
- Investigating the Translation Performance of a Large Multilingual Language Model: the Case of BLOOM (Bawden & Yvon, EAMT 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.eamt-1.16.pdf