Paying More Attention to Source Context: Mitigating Unfaithful Translations from Large Language Model

Hongbin Zhang, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Yang Xiang, Min Zhang


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities to handle various downstream tasks, including multilingual machine translation ability. Despite their impressive performance, decoder-only LLMs lack an explicit alignment between source and target contexts, leading to translation that may not faithfully represent the original content. To address this, we propose three learning strategies to encourage LLMs to pay more attention to the source context during translation: 1) adjusting attention weights on the source context by adaptive attention re-weighting; 2) suppressing the irrelevant target prefix using contrastive decoding; 3) avoiding excessive reliance on the target prefix through target-constrained tuning. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we curate a new dataset specifically focusing on unfaithful translations generated by LLMs. Experimental results on both human-collected and general test sets verify the effectiveness of our model across multiple language pairs. Further human evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our method in reducing hallucinatory translation and improving the fidelity of translations.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.821
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13816–13836
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.821
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.821
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongbin Zhang, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Yang Xiang, and Min Zhang. 2024. Paying More Attention to Source Context: Mitigating Unfaithful Translations from Large Language Model. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 13816–13836, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Paying More Attention to Source Context: Mitigating Unfaithful Translations from Large Language Model (Zhang et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.821.pdf