arXiv Computation and Language

Beyond "To whom it may concern": Tailoring Machine Translation to Audience and Intent

The paper investigates how machine translation can be tailored to specific audiences and intents, a capability enabled by large language models (LLMs). By systematically evaluating purpose-driven MT across 50 languages, 5 model sizes, and 8 text domains, the authors find that explicit instructions significantly improve translation adaptiveness, especially for informal domains, larger models, and higher-resource languages. They also show that traditional MT metrics often penalize adapted translations and that models can self-generate useful instructions from context, closing a large portion of the adaptiveness gap.

arXiv Computation and Language

Oct 9

Large Language Models for Machine Translation Quality Annotation: Humans and Models Are Both Challenged

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being tested as a cost‑effective alternative to human judgment for evaluating machine translation (MT). This study compares LLM agreement with human annotators on two MT quality schemes—Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA)—across 70 language pairs and public WMT23/25 data. Results show that while LLMs sometimes match or exceed human agreement, performance varies widely by scheme, language, and domain, and remains unreliable in many settings. The work also identifies specific challenges for both humans (e.g., fine‑grained MQM, low‑resource languages) and LLMs (e.g., minor errors, wrong language variants, span annotation).

By Hala Almaghout, Christian Federmann, Qin Gao

llms nlp

arXiv AI

Sep 10

BETA-Labeling for Multilingual Dataset Construction in Low-Resource IR

arXiv:2602.14488v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: IR in low-resource languages remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality, task-specific annotated datasets. Manual annotation is expensiv...

By Md. Najib Hasan, Mst. Jannatun Ferdous Rain, Fyad Mohammed, Nazmul Siddique

llms nlp benchmarks safety

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 7

Discourse Dependency: A Continuous Criterion for Translation Difficulty

The paper introduces discourse dependency (DDP) as a continuous measure of translation difficulty based on how far back a segment must look to resolve references. DDP is computed from named entity re‑mentions and pronominal coreference, and is validated against gold coreference with high reliability. Applying DDP to recent WMT benchmarks reveals a bias toward low‑DDP segments, and experiments show that as DDP increases, no current context‑injection strategy matches human post‑editing quality.

By Ahrii Kim, Chanjun Park, Seong-heum Kim

nlp benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 23

On the Systematic Challenges of Culturally Loaded Machine Translation: Dream of the Red Chamber as the Cultural Lens

arXiv:2607. 20241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms.

By Yiming Wang, Jiayuan Di

llms nlp

Hugging Face Trending Papers

Aug 16

Augmenting Text to Increase Translation Difficulty

As state-of-the-art machine translation models saturate standard benchmarks, the field needs more challenging evaluations to distinguish between models of varying quality. We propose augmenting existi...

llms nlp benchmarks safety

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 18

Evaluating Communicative Success in Machine-Translated Conversation

The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.

By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Alice Oh

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arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 4

Last Translation Benchmark

The paper introduces the Last Translation Benchmark (LTB), a live dataset of human-authored and peer‑reviewed examples—including texts, images, audio, and videos—that are designed to break current state‑of‑the‑art machine translation models. Each example is accompanied by handcrafted verification rules that specify concrete failure cases, providing a reliable and actionable evaluation method. The benchmark aims to overcome the limitations of existing automatic metrics and gold human evaluations, which often lack reproducibility, objectivity, and scalability.

By Vil\'em Zouhar, Niyati Bafna, Mukund Choudhary, Maike Z\"ufle, Sara Rajaee, Pinzhen Chen, Jannis Vamvas, Sara Papi, Ona de Gibert, Bhavitvya Malik, Eliya Habba, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Patr\'icia Schmidtov\'a, Michelle Wastl, Sheriff Issaka, Leshem Choshen, Stella Biderman, Antonis Anastasopoulos, Jan Niehues, Rico Sennrich, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ond\v{r}ej Bojar, Kenton Murray, J\"org Tiedemann, Alham Fikri Aji, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Alexandra Birch, Sowmya Vajjala, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet, Nobin Sarwar, David Kacz\'er, Shunta Asano, Malik Marmonier, Daban Q. Jaff, Vaisakhi Mishra, Hend Al- Khalifa, Gabriele Sarti, Sourajit Saha, Nils Rehlinger, Juan Daniel Cuervo Villa, Jonathan Tonglet, Saugata Purkayastha, Dominik Mach\'a\v{c}ek, Jagannathan Ramanujam, Heejin Do, Zuzana Nadova, Fred Philippy, Fabian Retkowski, Maria Lymperaiou, Silvia Casola, Hanna Yukhymenko, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Sangwon Ryu, Andr\'es Jerez, Ron Keinan, Shuaib Shuaib Yusuf, Avantica Vempati, Maria Carmen Staiano, Sukannya Purkayastha, Adrian Cosma, Vitalii Babenko, Erivan Inan, Aviral Nigam, Wafa Aissa, Fatima Haouari, Venkata Prasanth Kumar Gummadi, Mehdi Jafarzadeh, Valentin Scourneau, Lukas Edman, Kaiser Sun, Shaomu Tan, Mohammad Sadegh Gholizadeh, Johannes-Rudolf David, Dipankar Srirag, Javier Garc\'ia Gilabert, Ruta Binkyte, Manar Ali, Ana-Maria Bucur, Sabry E. Farrag, Youssef Saber, Yihong Liu, Jean Maillard, Cojocaru Nicoleta, Xiaochuang Yuan, Sina Ahmadi, Philipp Mondorf, Kaustubh Dhole, Roman Wixinger, Shenbin Qian, Manuel Tuor, Sergey Troshin, Jonathan Yahav, Fida Mohammad Thoker, Amir Arsalan Rezapour, Lance Calvin Lim Gamboa, Manon Reusens, K\"atriin Kukk, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Giuseppe Gallipoli, Christian Hoang, Shaswati Saha, Seth Aycock, Jan Koco\'n, Bo Chen, Linh Vu, Vatsal Venkatkrishna, Arafat Ahsan, Luan Thanh Nguyen, Hassan Soliman, Daryna Dementieva, Theresia Veronika Rampisela, Ngoc Quynh Tram Do, Marius Huber, Kazuki Egashira, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Vladislav Poritski, Mike Zhang, Deep Shah, Paul Gavrikov, Luis Frentzen Salim, David Africa, R. Damanhuri, Bello Umar Bello, Anumit Garg, Gengyu Rao, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Kamile Dementaviciute, Andrianos Michail, L D M S Sai Teja, Dawei Zhu, Yi Fan, Wei Liu, Farhan Farsi, Elias Herranen, Sankalan Pal Chowdhury, Karen Sanchez, Farzad Shami, Ashok Urlana, Zimu Wang, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Marii Ojastu, Hongbin Na, Emilian Radoi, Chenyi Zhao, Carlos Hinojosa, Andrea Gregor de Varda, Zaid Alyafeai, Reem Alzahrani, Nehal Kathrotia, Alex Fl\"uckiger, Ulysses Sekai Tully Carr, Jimson Paulo Layacan, Guy Kaplan, Ritwik Tiwari, Rishit Dagli, Oksana Volchek, Isaac R Caswell, Bowen Yi, Blanka K\"ov\'er, Amir Hossein Yari, Aicha Chorana, Zhengxiang Wang, Selja Ker\"anen, Samuel Simko, Joy Olusanya, Jenny Chim, Enzo Doyen, Vivek Harsha Lakkamaneni, Sophia Conrad, Pouya Sadeghi, Panayiotis Panayiotou, Luis Lara, Jannatul Nayem, Eran Yahav, Debanshu Das, Antonia Karamolegkou, Anmol Goel, Aishik Mandal, Tommaso Cerruti, Raoyuan Zhao, Mykola Haltiuk, Thura Aung, Naser Almousa, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Rachel Bawden, Qiaoyuan Zheng, Mateusz Lango, Beni Egressy, Fidel Rodr\'iguez Vel\'asquez, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Minh Ngoc Do, Marco Gaido, Lena Libon, Dzmitry Kuzmin, Badal Nyalang, Antoine Taroni, Andrei Niculae, Abdulaziz Nura Kani, Rushikesh Zawar, Marek \v{S}uppa, Beatrice Savoldi, Andreas Simons, Rayyan Merchant, Ilai Yaron Levy, Francesco Pinto, Ziyi Yang, Yolanda Xavier, Samuel Frontull, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Harris Abdul Majid, Francesca Padovani, Tim Graf, Tatiana Bielakova, Sharifa Djurabaeva, Shaoxiong Ji, Raia Abu Ahmad, Pavel Stepachev, Jirui Qi, Ayush Sunil Munot, Alireza Pakniat, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Yuxing Lu, Yurii Paniv, Xiyan Fu, Tosin Adewumi, Sunisth Kumar, St\'ephane J. P. S. Thunus, Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Shayan Bali, Prakhar Gupta, Papa Abdou Karim Karou Diallo, Matija Akrap, Marko Culjak, Krist\'yna Onderkov\'a, Joseph Attieh, Esrael Teferi Tensay, Elisabeth Fittschen, Beno\^it Sagot, Jingwei Ni, Yu Fan

nlp benchmarks

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 22

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

arXiv:2606.18389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated dat...

By Jan Cegin, Daniil Gurgurov, Yusser Al Ghussin, Simon Ostermann

llms fine-tuning

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 1

Pearmut: Human Evaluation of Translation Made Trivial

arXiv:2601.02933v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human evaluation is the gold standard for multilingual NLP, but is often skipped in practice and substituted with automatic metrics because it is n...

By Vil\'em Zouhar, Tom Kocmi

nlp

arXiv AI

Jun 17

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

arXiv:2606. 17354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP.

By Jacob Bremerman, Brihi Joshi, Hirona Arai, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May

nlp benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 25

Tag-Aware Structured Text Translation: Towards a Systematic Understanding

The paper introduces a systematic approach to tag-aware translation, addressing the trade-off between structural tag diversity and translation naturalness in synthetic data. It proposes a hybrid synthesis strategy (Hy‑LST) and a multi‑task fine‑tuning framework that decomposes translation into four sub‑tasks. Additionally, it employs a group relative policy optimization with three reward functions—fluency, tag fidelity, and tag‑scoped translation quality—to jointly optimize these objectives, achieving superior performance across six language pairs.

By Zhanglin Wu, Hengchao Shang, Daimeng Wei, Jiaxin Guo, Zongyao Li, Tengfei Song, Ning Xie, Weidong Zhang

llms fine-tuning safety

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 7

Cross-Preference Learning for Sentence-Level and Context-Aware Machine Translation

The paper introduces Cross-Preference Learning (CPL), a training framework that explicitly models the complementary strengths of sentence-level and context-aware machine translation. By incorporating intra- and cross-condition preferences into the optimization objective, CPL provides targeted supervision to leverage useful contextual signals while remaining robust to uninformative context. Experiments on multiple public context-aware MT tasks with models such as Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Llama-3-8B-Instruct show consistent improvements in translation quality and robustness without altering the model architecture.

By Ying Li, Xinglin Lyu, Junhui Li, Jinlong Yang, Hengchao Shang, Min Zhang, Shimin Tao, Daimeng Wei

llms nlp

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