arXiv Computation and Language

TeochewBench: A Human-Reviewed Benchmark for Teochew Hanzi Translation

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

From prompting to evidence-based translation: A RAG+prompt system for Japanese-Chinese translation and its pedagogical potential

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) system combined with prompt engineering for Japanese‑to‑Chinese translation, focusing on sentences with noun‑modifying clause constructions (NMCCs). It integrates linguistic analysis, embedding‑based retrieval, and prompt construction before generating translations with GPT‑4o, without altering the base model. Experiments on a 66‑sentence test set show that increasing the knowledge‑base size from 0 to 2,000 examples raises macro‑averaged BLEU scores from 24.28 to 29.96, indicating improved translation quality for NMCC‑rich sentences.

By Wenshi Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

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.

By Kaiyan Zhao, Zheyong Xie, Zhongtao Miao, Xinze Lyu, Yao Hu, Shaosheng Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Refined Assessment for Translation Evaluation: Rethinking Machine Translation Evaluation in the Era of Human-Level Systems

arXiv:2610.33749v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As machine translation systems approach human-level quality, traditional evaluation methodologies struggle to detect subtle translation errors. We crit...

By Dmitry Popov, Vladislav Negodin, Ekaterina Enikeeva, Iana Matrosova, Nikolay Karpachev, Max Ryabinin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

EviSI: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Agent for Simultaneous Interpreting

EviSI is an evidence‑based evaluation agent for low‑latency simultaneous speech‑to‑speech translation. It combines Multidimensional Quality Metrics with interpreter‑developed criteria, using shared source evidence to assess four dimensions—Anchor, Event, Logic, and Fluency—while deduplicating verified errors before scoring. On English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English data, EviSI’s rankings correlate strongly with human judgments, outperforming BLEU and COMET, and its multilingual extension maintains these correlations across five language directions.

By Ben Yan, Zongyao Li, Xiaoyu Chen, Daimeng Wei, Weidong Liu, Huan Zhao, Chong Li, Yaode Wang, Yuzhe Shang
arXiv AI
2d ago

Prompt Lottery in LLM-as-a-Judge: Measuring and Mitigating Sensitivity to Syntactic Rephrasing

The paper introduces the "Prompt Lottery" phenomenon, where paraphrastic rephrasings of judge prompts in LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaJ) lead to inconsistent judgments and can even reverse model rankings. A large-scale study across various tasks, judge families, and model backbones demonstrates that these prompt variations significantly alter evaluation outcomes. A user study shows that LLMaJ judges are 6–9 times more sensitive to prompt rephrasings than humans, and that aggregating multiple prompts improves robustness by focusing on consistent judgments.

By Ilija Subasic, Brett Levert, Andrew Rabinovich, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Zhao Chen
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