arXiv:2512. 07540v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Error Span Detection (ESD) extends automatic machine translation (MT) evaluation by localizing translation errors and labeling their severity.
By Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Chenchen Ding, Hideki Tanaka, Masao Utiyama, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura
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
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.
By Harshit Dhankhar, Baban Gain, Asif Ekbal, Yogesh Mani Tripathi
arXiv:2607. 17524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task.
By Zitong Huang, Gustavo Lucas Carvalho, Deqing Fu, Robin Jia
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.
arXiv:2607. 19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable Text Difficulty Assessment is a prerequisite for valid text simplification workflows and personalized learning applications.
By Yiheng Wu, Jue Hou, Roman Yangarber