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 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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

To What Extent Do Large Language Models Understand Bangla Idioms?

The paper introduces the first large‑scale benchmark dataset of Bangla idioms, along with a synthetic multiple‑choice question set for idiom meaning identification. It evaluates recent large language models on three idiom‑related tasks—paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and meaning identification—using zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Results show significant variability across models, with Phi‑4‑mini‑instruct best at paraphrasing, Kimi‑K2‑32b‑instruct excelling at span detection, and Gemini‑2.5‑flash leading in meaning identification.

By Mousumi Akter, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Swakkhar Shatabda
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

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.

By Raphael Merx, Ekaterina Vylomova, Trevor Cohn
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Beyond Accuracy: Community Perspectives on Machine Translation

The paper examines how four stakeholder groups—AI developers, professional translators, language learners, and language service providers—discuss machine translation on social media. Using a dataset of 79,286 posts from Reddit, Facebook, Bluesky, and Mastodon (2019‑2025), the authors find frequent disagreements and strong conflicts over translation quality, efficiency, and reliability. These conflicts arise because AI communities view the issues as technical, while non‑AI users prioritize quality nuances, time savings, trust, and broader social concerns.

By Yujun Wang, Ehud Reiter, Shimei Pan, Steffen Eger, Wei Zhao