Topic-guided Example Selection for Domain Adaptation in LLM-based Machine Translation

Current machine translation (MT) systems perform well in the domains on which they were trained, but adaptation to unseen domains remains a challenge.Rather than fine-tuning on domain data or modifying the architecture for training, an alternative approach exploits large language models (LLMs), which are performant across NLP tasks especially when presented with in-context examples.We focus on adapting a pre-trained LLM to a domain at inference through in-context example selection.For MT, examples are usually randomly selected from a development set.Some more recent methods though select using the more intuitive basis of test source similarity.We employ topic models to select examples based on abstract semantic relationships below the level of a domain.We test the relevance of these statistical models and use them to select informative examples even for out-of-domain inputs, experimenting on 7 diverse domains and 11 language pairs of differing resourcedness.Our method outperforms baselines on challenging multilingual out-of-domain tests, though it does not match performance with strong baselines for the in-language setting.We find that adding few-shot examples and related keywords consistently improves translation quality, that example diversity must be balanced with source similarity, and that our pipeline is overly restrictive for example selection when a targeted development set is available.