arXiv Computation and Language

Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts

The paper introduces CSM-MTBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine translation on Chinese social media text. It addresses two main challenges: limited parallel data due to slang and stylistic nuances, and inadequate evaluation metrics that miss these informal features. The benchmark includes two expert-curated subsets—Fun Posts and Social Snippets—and proposes specialized evaluation methods for each, revealing significant differences among over 20 MT models in handling semantic and stylistic aspects.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

CNeo-Bench: Diagnosing Large Language Models on Chinese Neologisms

CNeo-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 4,759 Chinese neologisms, each with reference definitions and categorized by linguistic mechanisms such as phonetic substitution and visual character decomposition. The benchmark includes a two-tier evaluation framework that tests whether models can describe a neologism and whether they can manipulate its underlying mechanism. Evaluation of 18 large language models shows that most perform poorly on definition generation (below 40%) and exhibit a recognition‑manipulation gap, often paraphrasing rather than restoring the original form; few‑shot prompting helps but does not fully resolve the errors.

By Kaiyan Zhao, Zhongtao Miao, Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
arXiv AI
Sep 21

CIBuzzBench: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Understanding of Chinese Internet Buzzwords

CIBuzzBench is a new benchmark that tests cross‑lingual understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords by providing 3,001 buzzwords with English explanations, equivalents, category labels, and harmfulness annotations. The benchmark defines three tasks—Meaning Explanation, Cross‑lingual Equivalent Matching, and Culturally Grounded Harmfulness Detection—to evaluate how well large language models translate and interpret these culturally nuanced terms. Experiments show that current state‑of‑the‑art LLMs still struggle with fine‑grained non‑literal meanings, robust matching, and accurate harmfulness detection across languages.

By Yifan Wang, Junyu Lu, Qifan Wang, Shun Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Jiahao Liu, Zhijun Cao, Lingbin Bu, Fanliang Bu
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

MetaHOPE: A Metaphor-Oriented Evaluation Framework for Analysing MT and LLM Translation Errors

MetaHOPE is an error‑severity‑aware annotation framework designed to evaluate how well machine translation (MT) and large language models (LLMs) translate metaphors. The authors applied MetaHOPE to three state‑of‑the‑art systems—GoogleMT, GPT5.4, and Hunyuan‑7b—using two human‑annotated metaphor corpora (VUAMC and PSUCMC) for English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English translation. They also produced a bilingual post‑edited gold reference, creating a new resource for metaphor translation research.

By Jiahui Liang, Lifeng Han
arXiv AI
Sep 7

You Really Didn't Get That? Benchmarking Social Pragmatic Inference for Indirect and Playful Chinese Online Comments

The paper introduces a benchmark for testing large language models (LLMs) on their ability to infer social pragmatic meanings in indirect and playful Chinese online comments. Using over 200,000 public social media interactions, the authors created 4,735 human-validated diagnostic items that pair a target comment with its preceding context and plausible misreadings. Eight LLMs were evaluated in a cross-writer setting, with the best model achieving 81.42% leave-writer-out accuracy, while human accuracy reached 90.8%. The study finds that models can detect broad irony or playfulness but often misidentify the specific mechanism or interactional move.

By Shiwei Hong, Junjie Ma, Emma Jiren Wang, Ethan Z. Rong, Siying Hu, Haichang Li, Ziying Wang, Zhicong Lu