SLoW: Select Low-frequency Words! Automatic Dictionary Selection for Translation on Large Language Models

Abstract

There are more than 7,000 languages around the world, and current Large Language Models (LLMs) only support hundreds of languages. Dictionary-based prompting methods can enhance translation on them, but most methods use all the available dictionaries, which could be expensive. Instead, it will be flexible to have a trade-off between token consumption and translation performance. This paper proposes a novel task called \textbf{A}utomatic \textbf{D}ictionary \textbf{S}election (\textbf{ADS}). The goal of the task is to automatically select which dictionary to use to enhance translation. We propose a novel and effective method which we call \textbf{S}elect \textbf{Lo}w-frequency \textbf{W}ords! (\textbf{SLoW}) which selects those dictionaries that have a lower frequency. Our methods have unique advantages. First, there is no need for access to the training data for frequency estimation (which is usually unavailable). Second, it inherits the advantage of dictionary-based methods, where no additional tuning is required on LLMs. Experimental results on 100 languages from FLORES indicate that SLoW surpasses strong baselines, and it can obviously save token usage, with many languages even surpassing the translation performance of the full dictionary baseline.\footnote{A shocking fact is that there is no need to use the actual training data (often unobtainable) for frequency estimation, and an estimation frequency obtained using public resources is still apparently effective in improving translation with ChatGPT and Llama, and DeepSeek.}\footnote{Code and data available upon publication.}