Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers focusing on the evolving challenges and methodologies in machine translation. The papers explore diverse areas such as subjective question generation, evaluation of user-generated content translations, and the integration of OCR with vision-language models for legal document translation. Additionally, they examine the evaluation of ancient Chinese corpora and delve into architectural design for language models, highlighting the field's dynamic and multifaceted nature.

Subjective Question Generation and Answer Evaluation using NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the most revolutionary technologies today. It uses artificial intelligence to understand human text and spoken words. It is used for text summarization, grammar checking, sentiment analysis, and advanced chatbots and has many more potential use cases. Furthermore, it has also made its mark on the education sector. Much research and advancements have already been conducted on objective question generation; however, automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation are still in progress. An automated system to generate subjective questions and evaluate the answers can help teachers assess student work and enhance the student's learning experience by allowing them to self-assess their understanding after reading an article or a chapter of a book. This research aims to improve current NLP models or make a novel one for automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation from text input.

When the Gold Standard isn't Necessarily Standard: Challenges of Evaluating the Translation of User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is characterised by frequent use of non-standard language, from spelling errors to expressive choices such as slang, character repetitions, and emojis. This makes evaluating UGC translation particularly challenging: what counts as a "good" translation depends on the level of standardness desired in the output. To explore this, we examine the human translation guidelines of four UGC datasets, and derive a taxonomy of twelve non-standard phenomena and five translation actions (NORMALISE, COPY, TRANSFER, OMIT, CENSOR). Our analysis reveals notable differences in how UGC is treated, resulting in a spectrum of standardness in reference translations. Through a case study on large language models (LLMs), we show that translation scores are highly sensitive to prompts with explicit translation instructions for UGC, and that they improve when these align with the dataset's guidelines. We argue that when preserving UGC style is important, fair evaluation requires both models and metrics to be aware of translation guidelines. Finally, we call for clear guidelines during dataset creation and for the development of controllable, guideline-aware evaluation frameworks for UGC translation.

Seeing Justice Clearly: Handwritten Legal Document Translation with OCR and Vision-Language Models

Handwritten text recognition (HTR) and machine translation continue to pose significant challenges, particularly for low-resource languages like Marathi, which lack large digitized corpora and exhibit high variability in handwriting styles. The conventional approach to address this involves a two-stage pipeline: an OCR system extracts text from handwritten images, which is then translated into the target language using a machine translation model. In this work, we explore and compare the performance of traditional OCR-MT pipelines with Vision Large Language Models that aim to unify these stages and directly translate handwritten text images in a single, end-to-end step. Our motivation is grounded in the urgent need for scalable, accurate translation systems to digitize legal records such as FIRs, charge sheets, and witness statements in India's district and high courts. We evaluate both approaches on a curated dataset of handwritten Marathi legal documents, with the goal of enabling efficient legal document processing, even in low-resource environments. Our findings offer actionable insights toward building robust, edge-deployable solutions that enhance access to legal information for non-native speakers and legal professionals alike.

AncientBench: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation on Excavated and Transmitted Chinese Corpora

Comprehension of ancient texts plays an important role in archaeology and understanding of Chinese history and civilization. The rapid development of large language models needs benchmarks that can evaluate their comprehension of ancient characters. Existing Chinese benchmarks are mostly targeted at modern Chinese and transmitted documents in ancient Chinese, but the part of excavated documents in ancient Chinese is not covered. To meet this need, we propose the AncientBench, which aims to evaluate the comprehension of ancient characters, especially in the scenario of excavated documents. The AncientBench is divided into four dimensions, which correspond to the four competencies of ancient character comprehension: glyph comprehension, pronunciation comprehension, meaning comprehension, and contextual comprehension. The benchmark also contains ten tasks, including radical, phonetic radical, homophone, cloze, translation, and more, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluation. We convened archaeological researchers to conduct experimental evaluations, proposed an ancient model as baseline, and conducted extensive experiments on the currently best-performing large language models. The experimental results reveal the great potential of large language models in ancient textual scenarios as well as the gap with humans. Our research aims to promote the development and application of large language models in the field of archaeology and ancient Chinese language.

Physics of Language Models: Part 4.1, Architecture Design and the Magic of Canon Layers

Understanding architectural differences in language models is challenging, especially at academic-scale pretraining (e.g., 1.3B parameters, 100B tokens), where results are often dominated by noise and randomness. To overcome this, we introduce controlled synthetic pretraining tasks that isolate and evaluate core model capabilities. Within this framework, we discover CANON LAYERS: lightweight architectural components -- named after the musical term "canon" -- that promote horizontal information flow across neighboring tokens. Canon layers compute weighted sums of nearby token representations and integrate seamlessly into Transformers, linear attention, state-space models, or any sequence architecture. We present 12 key results. This includes how Canon layers enhance reasoning depth (e.g., by $2\times$), reasoning breadth, knowledge manipulation, etc. They lift weak architectures like NoPE to match RoPE, and linear attention to rival SOTA linear models like Mamba2/GDN -- validated both through synthetic tasks and real-world academic-scale pretraining. This synthetic playground offers an economical, principled path to isolate core model capabilities often obscured at academic scales. Equipped with infinite high-quality data, it may even PREDICT how future architectures will behave as training pipelines improve -- e.g., through better data curation or RL-based post-training -- unlocking deeper reasoning and hierarchical inference.