Chain-of-Translation Prompting (CoTR): A Novel Prompting Technique for Low Resource Languages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04512v1
• Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2024 17:15:17 GMT
• Title: Chain-of-Translation Prompting (CoTR): A Novel Prompting Technique for Low Resource Languages
• Authors: Tejas Deshpande, Nidhi Kowtal, Raviraj Joshi,
• Abstract summary: Chain of Translation Prompting (CoTR) is a novel strategy designed to enhance the performance of language models in low-resource languages. CoTR restructures prompts to first translate the input context from a low-resource language into a higher-resource language, such as English. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method through a case study on the low-resource Indic language Marathi.
• Score: 0.4499833362998489
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: This paper introduces Chain of Translation Prompting (CoTR), a novel strategy designed to enhance the performance of language models in low-resource languages. CoTR restructures prompts to first translate the input context from a low-resource language into a higher-resource language, such as English. The specified task like generation, classification, or any other NLP function is then performed on the translated text, with the option to translate the output back to the original language if needed. All these steps are specified in a single prompt. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method through a case study on the low-resource Indic language Marathi. The CoTR strategy is applied to various tasks, including sentiment analysis, hate speech classification, subject classification and text generation, and its efficacy is showcased by comparing it with regular prompting methods. Our results underscore the potential of translation-based prompting strategies to significantly improve multilingual LLM performance in low-resource languages, offering valuable insights for future research and applications. We specifically see the highest accuracy improvements with the hate speech detection task. The technique also has the potential to enhance the quality of synthetic data generation for underrepresented languages using LLMs.

Related papers

• Think Carefully and Check Again! Meta-Generation Unlocking LLMs for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Summarization [108.6908427615402]
  Cross-lingual summarization ( CLS) aims to generate a summary for the source text in a different target language. Currently, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) excel at various English tasks. Recent studies have shown that LLMs' performance on CLS tasks remains unsatisfactory even with few-shot settings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-26T00:39:44Z)
• Trans-Tokenization and Cross-lingual Vocabulary Transfers: Language Adaptation of LLMs for Low-Resource NLP [13.662528492286528]
  We present a novel cross-lingual vocabulary transfer strategy, trans-tokenization, designed to tackle this challenge and enable more efficient language adaptation. Our approach focuses on adapting a high-resource monolingual LLM to an unseen target language by initializing the token embeddings of the target language using a weighted average of semantically similar token embeddings from the source language. We introduce Hydra LLMs, models with multiple swappable language modeling heads and embedding tables, which further extend the capabilities of our trans-tokenization strategy.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-08T08:37:28Z)
• Shortcomings of LLMs for Low-Resource Translation: Retrieval and Understanding are Both the Problem [4.830018386227]
  This work investigates the in-context learning abilities of pretrained large language models (LLMs) when instructed to translate text from a low-resource language into a high-resource language as part of an automated machine translation pipeline. We conduct a set of experiments translating Southern Quechua to Spanish and examine the informativity of various types of context retrieved from a constrained database of digitized pedagogical materials and parallel corpora.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-21T20:02:22Z)
• Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts [75.33019401706188]
  Large language models (LLMs) are known to effectively perform tasks by simply observing few exemplars. We propose to assemble synthetic exemplars from a diverse set of high-resource languages to prompt the LLMs to translate from any language into English. Our unsupervised prompting method performs on par with supervised few-shot learning in LLMs of different sizes for translations between English and 13 Indic and 21 African low-resource languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-20T08:27:47Z)
• T3L: Translate-and-Test Transfer Learning for Cross-Lingual Text Classification [50.675552118811]
  Cross-lingual text classification is typically built on large-scale, multilingual language models (LMs) pretrained on a variety of languages of interest. We propose revisiting the classic "translate-and-test" pipeline to neatly separate the translation and classification stages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-08T07:33:22Z)
• Strategies for improving low resource speech to text translation relying on pre-trained ASR models [59.90106959717875]
  This paper presents techniques and findings for improving the performance of low-resource speech to text translation (ST) We conducted experiments on both simulated and real-low resource setups, on language pairs English - Portuguese, and Tamasheq - French respectively.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-31T21:58:07Z)
• Reinforced Iterative Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition [54.92161571089808]
  Cross-lingual NER transfers knowledge from rich-resource language to languages with low resources. Existing cross-lingual NER methods do not make good use of rich unlabeled data in target languages. We develop a novel approach based on the ideas of semi-supervised learning and reinforcement learning.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-01T05:46:22Z)
• UNKs Everywhere: Adapting Multilingual Language Models to New Scripts [103.79021395138423]
  Massively multilingual language models such as multilingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM-R offer state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer performance on a range of NLP tasks. Due to their limited capacity and large differences in pretraining data, there is a profound performance gap between resource-rich and resource-poor target languages. We propose novel data-efficient methods that enable quick and effective adaptation of pretrained multilingual models to such low-resource languages and unseen scripts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-31T11:37:28Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.