How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have shown remarkable capabilities for natural language generation, but their performance for machine translation has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of GPT models for machine translation, covering various aspects such as quality of different GPT models in comparison with state-of-the-art research and commercial systems, effect of prompting strategies, robustness towards domain shifts and document-level translation. We experiment with eighteen different translation directions involving high and low resource languages, as well as non English-centric translations, and evaluate the performance of three GPT…