Machine Translation Digest for Aug 31 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers focusing on advancements in translation and language models. The highlighted works explore innovative techniques for improving translation accuracy, including topic-based translation using dictionaries and enhancing medical translation with enriched frameworks. Additionally, there is an emphasis on leveraging large language models for specialized domains like biomedical QA.
TMT: A Simple Way to Translate Topic Models Using Dictionaries
The training of topic models for a multilingual environment is a challenging task, requiring the use of sophisticated algorithms, topic-aligned corpora, and manual evaluation. These difficulties are further exacerbated when the developer lacks knowledge of the target language or is working in an environment with limited data, where only small or unusable multilingual corpora are available. Considering these challenges, we introduce Topic Model Translation (TMT), a novel, robust and transparent technique designed to transfer topic models (e.g., Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) based topic models) from one language to another, without the need for metadata, embeddings, or aligned corpora. TMT enables the reuse of topic models across languages, making it especially suitable for scenarios where large corpora in the target language are unavailable or manual translation is infeasible. Furthermore, we evaluate TMT extensively using both quantitative and qualitative methods, demonstrating that it produces semantically coherent and consistent topic translations.
CaresAI at BioCreative IX Track 1 -- LLM for Biomedical QA
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evident for accurate question answering across various domains. However, rigorous evaluation of their performance on complex question-answering (QA) capabilities is essential before deployment in real-world biomedical and healthcare applications. This paper presents our approach to the MedHopQA track of the BioCreative IX shared task, which focuses on multi-hop biomedical question answering involving diseases, genes, and chemicals. We adopt a supervised fine-tuning strategy leveraging LLaMA 3 8B, enhanced with a curated biomedical question-answer dataset compiled from external sources including BioASQ, MedQuAD, and TREC. Three experimental setups are explored: fine-tuning on combined short and long answers, short answers only, and long answers only. While our models demonstrate strong domain understanding, achieving concept-level accuracy scores of up to 0.8, their Exact Match (EM) scores remain significantly lower, particularly in the test phase. We introduce a two-stage inference pipeline for precise short-answer extraction to mitigate verbosity and improve alignment with evaluation metrics. Despite partial improvements, challenges persist in generating strictly formatted outputs. Our findings highlight the gap between semantic understanding and exact answer evaluation in biomedical LLM applications, motivating further research in output control and post-processing strategies.
Performance Analysis of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms for Text Classification
The demand for text classification is growing significantly in web searching, data mining, web ranking, recommendation systems, and so many other fields of information and technology. This paper illustrates the text classification process on different datasets using some standard supervised machine learning techniques. Text documents can be classified through various kinds of classifiers. Labeled text documents are used to classify the text in supervised classifications. This paper applies these classifiers on different kinds of labeled documents and measures the accuracy of the classifiers. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model using Back Propagation Network (BPN) is used with several other models to create an independent platform for labeled and supervised text classification process. An existing benchmark approach is used to analyze the performance of classification using labeled documents. Experimental analysis on real data reveals which model works well in terms of classification accuracy.
MedCOD: Enhancing English-to-Spanish Medical Translation of Large Language Models Using Enriched Chain-of-Dictionary Framework
We present MedCOD (Medical Chain-of-Dictionary), a hybrid framework designed to improve English-to-Spanish medical translation by integrating domain-specific structured knowledge into large language models (LLMs). MedCOD integrates domain-specific knowledge from both the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and the LLM-as-Knowledge-Base (LLM-KB) paradigm to enhance structured prompting and fine-tuning. We constructed a parallel corpus of 2,999 English-Spanish MedlinePlus articles and a 100-sentence test set annotated with structured medical contexts. Four open-source LLMs (Phi-4, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-7B, and LLaMA-3.1-8B) were evaluated using structured prompts that incorporated multilingual variants, medical synonyms, and UMLS-derived definitions, combined with LoRA-based fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that MedCOD significantly improves translation quality across all models. For example, Phi-4 with MedCOD and fine-tuning achieved BLEU 44.23, chrF++ 28.91, and COMET 0.863, surpassing strong baseline models like GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. Ablation studies confirm that both MedCOD prompting and model adaptation independently contribute to performance gains, with their combination yielding the highest improvements. These findings highlight the potential of structured knowledge integration to enhance LLMs for medical translation tasks.
EviNote-RAG: Enhancing RAG Models via Answer-Supportive Evidence Notes
Large Language Models (LLMs) empowered with retrieval mechanisms have achieved strong progress in open-domain question answering (QA). Yet, the conventional retrieve--then--answer paradigm often suffers from two key limitations: (1) low signal-to-noise ratio in retrieved evidence, where useful information is buried under irrelevant content, and (2) error accumulation in multi-hop reasoning when incomplete or noisy passages are involved. To address these challenges, we present EviNote-RAG, an agentic RAG framework that introduces a structured retrieve--note--answer pipeline. Instead of directly reasoning over raw retrievals, the model is trained to compose Supportive-Evidence Notes (SENs), concise, human-like notes that preserve only answer-relevant information, highlight uncertainty, and explicitly state when no useful evidence exists. This distillation process is further reinforced by the Evidence Quality Reward (EQR), an entailment-based signal that evaluates whether SENs logically support the final answer. Together, SENs and EQR guide the model toward faithful and robust reasoning, while reducing the impact of noise. Experiments on in-domain and out-of-domain QA benchmarks show that EviNote-RAG consistently outperforms strong baselines in accuracy, generalization, and training stability. In particular, it achieves state-of-the-art results while enhancing robustness and efficiency, yielding relative F1 gains of 20\% on HotpotQA (+0.093), 40\% on Bamboogle (+0.151), and 91\% on 2Wiki (+0.256) via denser rewards and reduced verbosity.
| Curated by yukajii.com |