arXiv Computation and Language
2d 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
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
Oct 15

Qwen-MT-Lumen at WMT2026: Instruction-Specialized Translation via Quality-Aware Training and On-Policy Distillation

Qwen-MT-Lumen is an open‑source translation model submitted to the WMT 2026 General Machine Translation Shared Task. It employs a four‑stage pipeline that combines continued pre‑training, supervised fine‑tuning, online preference‑optimization with an LLM judge, and on‑policy distillation from a larger teacher to a Qwen3‑14B student. The system also uses structure‑aware inference and selective repair to preserve formatting and correct decoding errors, achieving an overall mean score of 4.60 on a 1–5 rubric and matching leading proprietary systems in both translation quality and instruction adherence.

By Hao Wang, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao, Heng Liu, Zifu Shang, Tianhao Li, Ruize Gao, Jialong Tang, Liangying Shao, Haoran Wei, Baosong Yang, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Multi-SFT: Permissively-Licensed Multilingual Instruction-Following

Multi‑SFT is a new, commercially permissive dataset comprising 502,818 instruction‑response pairs in five European languages, created through translation and regeneration pipelines to address gaps where simple translation is insufficient. Human evaluation shows strong inter‑annotator agreement (≥0.87) across all languages. Fine‑tuning nine models from three families on Multi‑SFT yields performance competitive with larger, proprietary mixes and official instruction‑tuned releases, especially on safety‑related benchmarks.

By Daniela Baiamonte, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Elena Fano, Stefano Simonazzi, Andrea Zugarini
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