Enriching the Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation with Large Language Model

AbstractImproving the performance of neural machine translation for low-resource languages is challenging due to the limited availability of parallel corpora. However, recently available Large Language Models (LLM) have demonstrated superior performance in various natural language processing tasks, including translation. In this work, we propose to incorporate an LLM into a Machine Translation (MT) model as a prior distribution to leverage its translation capabilities. The LLM acts as a teacher, instructing the student MT model about the target language. We conducted an experiment in four language pairs: English ⇔ German and English ⇔ Hindi. This resulted in improved BLEU and COMET scores in a low-resource setting.