arXiv AI By Dingming Li, Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Hongxing Li, Zixuan Wang, Xinze Lyu, Ye Guo, Daoxin Zhang, Zhe Xu, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen

Beyond Words Alone: Disentangling Distributed Evidence for Visually Grounded Cultural Translation

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The paper introduces Culture-MMT, a benchmark for evaluating how well machine translation systems can reconstruct meaning from distributed evidence in social‑media posts. It contains 498 curated, de‑identified user‑generated content instances across 20 domains, classified into Symbol, Visual, and Hybrid based on the type of evidence required. Experiments with 17 model configurations show that real images significantly improve translation for Visual and Hybrid cases, while random images do not, underscoring the importance of accurate visual grounding and cultural adaptation.

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