Simplifying Translations for Children: Iterative Simplification Considering Age of Acquisition with LLMs
Masashi Oshika, Makoto Morishita, Tsutomu Hirao, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda
Abstract
In recent years, neural machine translation (NMT) has become widely used in everyday life. However, the current NMT lacks a mechanism to adjust the difficulty level of translations to match the user’s language level. Additionally, due to the bias in the training data for NMT, translations of simple source sentences are often produced with complex words. In particular, this could pose a problem for children, who may not be able to understand the meaning of the translations correctly. In this study, we propose a method that replaces high Age of Acquisitions (AoA) words in translations with simpler words to match the translations to the user’s level. We achieve this by using large language models (LLMs), providing a triple of a source sentence, a translation, and a target word to be replaced. We create a benchmark dataset using back-translation on Simple English Wikipedia. The experimental results obtained from the dataset show that our method effectively replaces high-AoA words with lower-AoA words and, moreover, can iteratively replace most of the high-AoA words while still maintaining high BLEU and COMET scores.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.findings-acl.506
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8567–8577
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.506
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.506
- Cite (ACL):
- Masashi Oshika, Makoto Morishita, Tsutomu Hirao, Ryohei Sasano, and Koichi Takeda. 2024. Simplifying Translations for Children: Iterative Simplification Considering Age of Acquisition with LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 8567–8577, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Simplifying Translations for Children: Iterative Simplification Considering Age of Acquisition with LLMs (Oshika et al., Findings 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.findings-acl.506.pdf