m3P: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt
Abstract
Multilingual translation supports multiple translation directions by projecting all languages in a shared space, but the translation quality is undermined by the difference between languages in the text-only modality, especially when the number of languages is large. To bridge this gap, we introduce visual context as the universal language-independent representation to facilitate multilingual translation. In this paper, we propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual neural Machine Translation (m3P), which aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation. We construct a multilingual multimodal instruction dataset (InstrMulti102) to support 102 languages. Our method aims to minimize the representation distance of different languages by regarding the image as a central language. Experimental results show that m3P outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. Furthermore, the probing experiments validate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing translation under the low-resource and massively multilingual scenario.
@inproceedings{m3P,
title = "m3{P}: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt",
author = "Yang, Jian and
Guo, Hongcheng and
Yin, Yuwei and
Bai, Jiaqi and
Wang, Bing and
Liu, Jiaheng and
Liang, Xinnian and
Chai, LinZheng and
Yang, Liqun and
Li, Zhoujun",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = "may",
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.948",
pages = "10858--10871",
}
