ParroT: Translating during Chat using Large Language Models tuned with Human Translation and Feedback
This work addresses the need for accessible and regulated translation capabilities in open-source LLMs for researchers and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM and instruction-tuning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing translation abilities in open-source large language models (LLMs) during chat by proposing ParroT, a framework that uses human translation and feedback data, resulting in significant improvements in translation performance on Flores subsets and WMT22 test sets.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have exhibited remarkable abilities on a wide range of natural language processing~(NLP) tasks, including various machine translation abilities accomplished during chat. However, these models are only accessible through restricted APIs, which creates barriers to new research and advancements in the field. Therefore, we propose ParroT, a framework to enhance and regulate the translation abilities during chat based on open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA), human-written translation and feedback data. Specifically, ParroT reformulates translation data into the instruction-following style, and introduces a "$\mathbf{Hint}$" field for incorporating extra requirements to regulate the translation process. Accordingly, we propose three instruction types for finetuning ParroT models, including translation instruction, contrastive instruction, and error-guided instruction. Experiments on Flores subsets and WMT22 test sets suggest that translation instruction improves the translation performance of vanilla LLMs significantly while error-guided instruction can lead to further improvement, which demonstrates the importance of learning from low-quality translations annotated by humans. We also demonstrate the potential of automatic evaluation tools in providing quality information of translations, when constructing error-guided instructions for directions that lack human annotation data. Please refer to our Github project for more implementation details: https://github.com/wxjiao/ParroT