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Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance

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arxiv 2211.09102 v3 pith:G3EHBQPT submitted 2022-11-16 cs.CL

Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance

classification cs.CL
keywords palmperformancetranslationabilitylanguagellmspromptingstrategies
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM's MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM's MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. The Effect of Training Task Diversity on In-Context Learning through the Lens of Low-Dimensional Subspaces

    stat.ML 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A low-rank Gaussian mixture model shows that training task diversity measured by non-overlapping subspace columns improves ICL generalization and shortens learning plateaus for linear attention, with empirical extensi...

  2. SLoW: Select Low-frequency Words! Automatic Dictionary Selection for Translation on Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    SLoW selects low-frequency word dictionaries to boost LLM translation quality and efficiency across 100 languages from FLORES.

  3. Dictionary Insertion Prompting for Multilingual Reasoning on Multilingual Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2024-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DIP interleaves English word translations into non-English prompts to boost multilingual reasoning on synthetic benchmarks spanning 10-200 languages.

  4. PaLM 2 Technical Report

    cs.CL 2023-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    PaLM 2 reports state-of-the-art results on language, reasoning, and multilingual tasks with improved efficiency over PaLM.