CTQScorer: Combining Multiple Features for In-context Example Selection for Machine Translation

Aswanth Kumar M, Ratish Puduppully, Raj Dabre, Anoop Kunchukuttan

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Machine Translation

Keywords: few-shot prompting, machine translation, example selection

TL;DR: We propose a general framework for combining different features influencing example selection for few-shot machine translation.

Abstract:

Large language models have demonstrated the capability to perform on machine translation when the input is prompted with a few examples (in-context learning).
Translation quality depends on various features of the selected examples, such as their quality and relevance, but previous work has predominantly focused on individual features in isolation. In this paper, we propose a general framework for combining different features influencing example selection. We learn a regression model, CTQ Scorer (Contextual Translation Quality), that selects examples based on multiple features in order to maximize the translation quality. On multiple language pairs and language models, we show that CTQ Scorer helps significantly outperform random selection as well as strong single-factor baselines reported in the literature. We also see an improvement of over 2.5 COMET points on average with respect to a strong BM25 retrieval-based baseline.

Submission Number: 2570