Interactive-Chain-Prompting: Ambiguity Resolution for Crosslingual Conditional Generation with Interaction

Crosslingual conditional generation (e.g., machine translation) has long enjoyed the benefits of scaling. Nonetheless, there are still issues that scale alone may not overcome. For instance, in the absence of additional context, a source query in one language may yield several translation options in another language. Only one translation could be acceptable however, depending on the translator's preferences and goals. Choosing the incorrect option might significantly affect translation usefulness and quality. We propose a novel method interactive-chain prompting --- a series of question, answering and generation intermediate steps between a Translator model and a User model --- that reduces translations into a list of subproblems addressing ambiguities and then resolving such subproblems before producing the final translated text. To check ambiguity resolution capabilities and evaluate translation quality, we create a dataset exhibiting different linguistic phenomena which lead to ambiguities at inference for four languages. To encourage further exploration in this direction, we release all datasets. We note that interactive-chain prompting, using eight interactions as exemplars, consistently surpasses prompt-based methods with direct access to background information to resolve ambiguities.