Optimizing example selection for retrieval-augmented machine translation with translation memories

Retrieval-augmented machine translation leverages examples from a translation memory by retrieving similar instances. These examples are used to condition the predictions of a neural decoder. We aim to improve the upstream retrieval step and consider a fixed downstream edit-based model: the multi-Levenshtein Transformer. The task consists of finding a set of examples that maximizes the overall coverage of the source sentence. To this end, we rely on the theory of submodular functions and explore new algorithms to optimize this coverage. We evaluate the resulting performance gains for the machine translation task.

Retrieving Examples from Memory for Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation: A Systematic Comparison

Retrieval-Augmented Neural Machine Translation (RAMT) architectures retrieve examples from memory to guide the generation process. While most works in this trend explore new ways to exploit the retrieved examples, the upstream retrieval step is mostly unexplored. In this paper, we study the effect of varying retrieval methods for several translation architectures, to better understand the interplay between these two processes. We conduct experiments in two language pairs in a multi-domain setting and consider several downstream architectures based on a standard autoregressive model, an edit-based model, and a large language model with in-context learning. Our experiments show that the choice of the retrieval technique impacts the translation scores, with variance across architectures. We also discuss the effects of increasing the number and diversity of examples, which are mostly positive across the board.

Towards Example-Based NMT with Multi-Levenshtein Transformers

Retrieval-Augmented Machine Translation (RAMT) is attracting growing attention. This is because RAMT not only improves translation metrics, but is also assumed to implement some form of domain adaptation. In this contribution, we study another salient trait of RAMT, its ability to make translation decisions more transparent by allowing users to go back to examples that contributed to these decisions. For this, we propose a novel architecture aiming to increase this transparency. This model adapts a retrieval-augmented version of the Levenshtein Transformer and makes it amenable to simultaneously edit multiple fuzzy matches found in memory. We discuss how to perform training and inference in this model, based on multi-way alignment algorithms and imitation learning. Our experiments show that editing several examples positively impacts translation scores, notably increasing the number of target spans that are copied from existing instances.