Dominic Philipp Fischer


2024

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LLM-based Machine Translation and Summarization for Latin
Martin Volk | Dominic Philipp Fischer | Lukas Fischer | Patricia Scheurer | Phillip Benjamin Ströbel
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024

This paper presents an evaluation of machine translation for Latin. We tested multilingual Large Language Models, in particular GPT-4, on letters from the 16th century that are in Latin and Early New High German. Our experiments include translation and cross-language summarization for the two historical languages into modern English and German. We show that LLM-based translation for Latin is clearly superior to previous approaches. We also show that LLM-based paraphrasing of Latin paragraphs from the historical letters produces English and German summaries that are close to human summaries published in the edition.