Towards Effective Disambiguation for Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Resolving semantic ambiguity has long been recognised as a central challenge in the field of machine translation. Recent work on benchmarking translation performance on ambiguous sentences has exposed the limitations of conventional Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems, which fail to capture many of these cases. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative, demonstrating comparable performance to traditional NMT models while introducing new paradigms for controlling the target outputs. In this paper, we study the capabilities of LLMs to translate ambiguous sentences containing polysemous words and rare word senses. We also propose two ways to improve the handling of such ambiguity through in-context learning and fine-tuning on carefully curated ambiguous datasets. Experiments show that our methods can match or outperform state-of-the-art systems such as DeepL and NLLB in four out of five language directions. Our research provides valuable insights into effectively adapting LLMs for disambiguation during machine translation.