Controlling Translation Formality Using Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models
This work addresses the challenge of formality control in spoken language translation for multiple languages, though it is incremental as it builds on pre-trained models.
The paper tackled the problem of controlling translation formality across multiple languages using a single multilingual model, achieving results that approach dedicated translation models in both translation quality and formality control.
This paper describes the University of Maryland's submission to the Special Task on Formality Control for Spoken Language Translation at \iwslt, which evaluates translation from English into 6 languages with diverse grammatical formality markers. We investigate to what extent this problem can be addressed with a \textit{single multilingual model}, simultaneously controlling its output for target language and formality. Results show that this strategy can approach the translation quality and formality control achieved by dedicated translation models. However, the nature of the underlying pre-trained language model and of the finetuning samples greatly impact results.