TreePrompt: Leveraging Hierarchical Few-Shot Example Selection for Improved English-Persian and English-German Translation
This work addresses the challenge of example selection for machine translation practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing few-shot prompting techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of selecting high-quality examples for few-shot prompting in machine translation by proposing TreePrompt, a hierarchical method that learns LLM preferences, and showed improved performance when combined with AFSP or Random selection on English-Persian and English-German datasets.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have consistently demonstrated strong performance in machine translation, especially when guided by high-quality prompts. Few-shot prompting is an effective technique to improve translation quality; however, most existing example selection methods focus solely on query-to-example similarity and do not account for the quality of the examples. In this work, we propose TreePrompt, a novel example selection approach that learns LLM preferences to identify high-quality, contextually relevant examples within a tree-structured framework. To further explore the balance between similarity and quality, we combine TreePrompt with K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) and Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting (AFSP). Evaluations on two language pairs - English-Persian (MIZAN) and English-German (WMT19) - show that integrating TreePrompt with AFSP or Random selection leads to improved translation performance.