Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Hongyuan Lu; name: Haoyang Huang; name: Dongdong Zhang; name: Haoran Yang; name: Wai Lam; name: Furu Wei
Published: 2023-05-11 05:19:47

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in
multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without
parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is
gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for
low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve
relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on
LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should
we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which
augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries
for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive
experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up
to 13x ChrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in
Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the
importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the
superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.