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December 26, 2025

Machine Translation Digest for Dec 21 2025

Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers focused on advancements in machine translation and document analysis. The papers explore innovative training strategies for legal language translation and propose new approaches for evaluating translation quality without error annotations. Additionally, they address challenges such as document inconsistencies and transcription of historical texts using deep learning.


From Scratch to Fine-Tuned: A Comparative Study of Transformer Training Strategies for Legal Machine Translation

In multilingual nations like India, access to legal information is often hindered by language barriers, as much of the legal and judicial documentation remains in English. Legal Machine Translation (L-MT) offers a scalable solution to this challenge by enabling accurate and accessible translations of legal documents. This paper presents our work for the JUST-NLP 2025 Legal MT shared task, focusing on English-Hindi translation using Transformer-based approaches. We experiment with 2 complementary strategies, fine-tuning a pre-trained OPUS-MT model for domain-specific adaptation and training a Transformer model from scratch using the provided legal corpus. Performance is evaluated using standard MT metrics, including SacreBLEU, chrF++, TER, ROUGE, BERTScore, METEOR, and COMET. Our fine-tuned OPUS-MT model achieves a SacreBLEU score of 46.03, significantly outperforming both baseline and from-scratch models. The results highlight the effectiveness of domain adaptation in enhancing translation quality and demonstrate the potential of L-MT systems to improve access to justice and legal transparency in multilingual contexts.


Remedy-R: Generative Reasoning for Machine Translation Evaluation without Error Annotations

Over the years, automatic MT metrics have hillclimbed benchmarks and presented strong and sometimes human-level agreement with human ratings. Yet they remain black-box, offering little insight into their decision-making and often failing under real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. We introduce Remedy-R, a reasoning-driven generative MT metric trained with reinforcement learning from pairwise translation preferences, without requiring error-span annotations or distillation from closed LLMs. Remedy-R produces step-by-step analyses of accuracy, fluency, and completeness, followed by a final score, enabling more interpretable assessments. With only 60K training pairs across two language pairs, Remedy-R remains competitive with top scalar metrics and GPT-4-based judges on WMT22-24 meta-evaluation, generalizes to other languages, and exhibits strong robustness on OOD stress tests. Moreover, Remedy-R models generate self-reflective feedback that can be reused for translation improvement. Building on this finding, we introduce Remedy-R Agent, a simple evaluate-revise pipeline that leverages Remedy-R's evaluation analysis to refine translations. This agent consistently improves translation quality across diverse models, including Qwen2.5, ALMA-R, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini-2.0-Flash, suggesting that Remedy-R's reasoning captures translation-relevant information and is practically useful.


On Finding Inconsistencies in Documents

Professionals in academia, law, and finance audit their documents because inconsistencies can result in monetary, reputational, and scientific costs. Language models (LMs) have the potential to dramatically speed up this auditing process. To understand their abilities, we introduce a benchmark, FIND (Finding INconsistencies in Documents), where each example is a document with an inconsistency inserted manually by a domain expert. Despite the documents being long, technical, and complex, the best-performing model (gpt-5) recovered 64% of the inserted inconsistencies. Surprisingly, gpt-5 also found undiscovered inconsistencies present in the original documents. For example, on 50 arXiv papers, we judged 136 out of 196 of the model's suggestions to be legitimate inconsistencies missed by the original authors. However, despite these findings, even the best models miss almost half of the inconsistencies in FIND, demonstrating that inconsistency detection is still a challenging task.


LLM-CAS: Dynamic Neuron Perturbation for Real-Time Hallucination Correction

Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinated content that lacks factual or contextual grounding, limiting their reliability in critical applications. Existing approaches such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback are data intensive and computationally expensive, while static parameter editing methods struggle with context dependent errors and catastrophic forgetting. We propose LLM-CAS, a framework that formulates real-time hallucination correction as a hierarchical reinforcement learning problem. LLM-CAS trains an agent to learn a policy that dynamically selects temporary neuron perturbations during inference based on the current context. Unlike prior dynamic approaches that rely on heuristic or predefined adjustments, this policy driven mechanism enables adaptive and fine grained correction without permanent parameter modification. Experiments across multiple language models demonstrate that LLM-CAS consistently improves factual accuracy, achieving gains of 10.98 percentage points on StoryCloze, 2.71 points on TriviaQA, and 2.06 points on the MC1 score of TruthfulQA. These results outperform both static editing methods such as ITI and CAA and the dynamic SADI framework. Overall, LLM-CAS provides an efficient and context aware solution for improving the reliability of LLMs, with promising potential for future multimodal extensions.


Application of deep learning approaches for medieval historical documents transcription

Handwritten text recognition and optical character recognition solutions show excellent results with processing data of modern era, but efficiency drops with Latin documents of medieval times. This paper presents a deep learning method to extract text information from handwritten Latin-language documents of the 9th to 11th centuries. The approach takes into account the properties inherent in medieval documents. The paper provides a brief introduction to the field of historical document transcription, a first-sight analysis of the raw data, and the related works and studies. The paper presents the steps of dataset development for further training of the models. The explanatory data analysis of the processed data is provided as well. The paper explains the pipeline of deep learning models to extract text information from the document images, from detecting objects to word recognition using classification models and embedding word images. The paper reports the following results: recall, precision, F1 score, intersection over union, confusion matrix, and mean string distance. The plots of the metrics are also included. The implementation is published on the GitHub repository.

Curated by yukajii.com
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