arXiv AI

Balancing Global Quality and Pronoun-Specific Feedback for Context-Aware Machine Translation

The paper introduces ProNMT, a reward-guided iterative self‑training approach that balances global translation quality with pronoun‑specific feedback for context‑aware machine translation. ProNMT samples candidate translations, scores them using reference‑free quality estimation and a pronoun label derived from references, and fine‑tunes on the highest‑scoring candidate. Experiments on English–German Europarl and English–French News Commentary show that ProNMT outperforms standard context‑aware fine‑tuning on BLEU and COMET, while ablations reveal that pronoun‑only feedback can harm overall quality and that confidence‑weighted feedback outperforms hard binary feedback.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Is Human Annotation Necessary? Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection in Machine Translation

The paper introduces Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection (ESD) in machine translation, a self‑evolution framework that replaces human annotations with pseudo‑labels generated by a large language model. By iteratively applying Minimum Bayes Risk decoding, the method produces high‑quality error spans without costly human effort. Experiments on WMT Metrics Shared Task datasets show that models trained solely on these pseudo‑labels outperform both unadapted baselines and supervised models trained on human data at system and span levels, while keeping sentence‑level performance competitive.

By Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Zhi Qu
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
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations

ProBel is a bilingual Arabic and English resource for propaganda detection that aligns binary labels, multi-label annotations for 23 propaganda techniques grouped into six categories, technique-labeled spans, and reference explanations for news sentences. The dataset supports matched binary, coarse-grained, multi-label, and span-level tasks in both languages, and the authors evaluate zero‑shot prompting, task‑specific fine‑tuning, and joint training. A single bilingual multi‑task model achieves the best overall performance, with cross‑task analysis revealing that joint classification preserves binary performance while span‑only training can weaken sentence‑level prediction, and that joint bilingual training yields the most stable results.

By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

Token-Level Off-Policy Learning for Faithful Generation Under Distribution Shift

We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task. Our key intuition is that by training the model to distinguish good and bad tokens in a response, we naturally guide the model towards generating good tokens, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with directly training the model to generate off-policy tokens.