Machine Translation Digest for Jun 13 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring innovative approaches in machine translation and evaluation. The common theme revolves around enhancing language models to better handle low-resource languages, correct grammatical errors in specific languages, and improve their ability to identify missing information in multilingual contexts.
A Gamified Evaluation and Recruitment Platform for Low Resource Language Machine Translation Systems
Human evaluators provide necessary contributions in evaluating large language models. In the context of Machine Translation (MT) systems for low-resource languages (LRLs), this is made even more apparent since popular automated metrics tend to be string-based, and therefore do not provide a full picture of the nuances of the behavior of the system. Human evaluators, when equipped with the necessary expertise of the language, will be able to test for adequacy, fluency, and other important metrics. However, the low resource nature of the language means that both datasets and evaluators are in short supply. This presents the following conundrum: How can developers of MT systems for these LRLs find adequate human evaluators and datasets? This paper first presents a comprehensive review of existing evaluation procedures, with the objective of producing a design proposal for a platform that addresses the resource gap in terms of datasets and evaluators in developing MT systems. The result is a design for a recruitment and gamified evaluation platform for developers of MT systems. Challenges are also discussed in terms of evaluating this platform, as well as its possible applications in the wider scope of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research.
Rethinking Multilingual Vision-Language Translation: Dataset, Evaluation, and Adaptation
Vision-Language Translation (VLT) is a challenging task that requires accurately recognizing multilingual text embedded in images and translating it into the target language with the support of visual context. While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong multilingual and visual understanding capabilities, there is a lack of systematic evaluation and understanding of their performance on VLT. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of VLT from three key perspectives: data quality, model architecture, and evaluation metrics. (1) We identify critical limitations in existing datasets, particularly in semantic and cultural fidelity, and introduce AibTrans -- a multilingual, parallel, human-verified dataset with OCR-corrected annotations. (2) We benchmark 11 commercial LVLMs/LLMs and 6 state-of-the-art open-source models across end-to-end and cascaded architectures, revealing their OCR dependency and contrasting generation versus reasoning behaviors. (3) We propose Density-Aware Evaluation to address metric reliability issues under varying contextual complexity, introducing the DA Score as a more robust measure of translation quality. Building upon these findings, we establish a new evaluation benchmark for VLT. Notably, we observe that fine-tuning LVLMs on high-resource language pairs degrades cross-lingual performance, and we propose a balanced multilingual fine-tuning strategy that effectively adapts LVLMs to VLT without sacrificing their generalization ability.
KoGEC : Korean Grammatical Error Correction with Pre-trained Translation Models
This research introduces KoGEC, a Korean Grammatical Error Correction system using pre--trained translation models. We fine-tuned NLLB (No Language Left Behind) models for Korean GEC, comparing their performance against large language models like GPT-4 and HCX-3. The study used two social media conversation datasets for training and testing. The NLLB models were fine-tuned using special language tokens to distinguish between original and corrected Korean sentences. Evaluation was done using BLEU scores and an "LLM as judge" method to classify error types. Results showed that the fine-tuned NLLB (KoGEC) models outperformed GPT-4o and HCX-3 in Korean GEC tasks. KoGEC demonstrated a more balanced error correction profile across various error types, whereas the larger LLMs tended to focus less on punctuation errors. We also developed a Chrome extension to make the KoGEC system accessible to users. Finally, we explored token vocabulary expansion to further improve the model but found it to decrease model performance. This research contributes to the field of NLP by providing an efficient, specialized Korean GEC system and a new evaluation method. It also highlights the potential of compact, task-specific models to compete with larger, general-purpose language models in specialized NLP tasks.
ImmunoFOMO: Are Language Models missing what oncologists see?
Language models (LMs) capabilities have grown with a fast pace over the past decade leading researchers in various disciplines, such as biomedical research, to increasingly explore the utility of LMs in their day-to-day applications. Domain specific language models have already been in use for biomedical natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recently however, the interest has grown towards medical language models and their understanding capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the medical conceptual grounding of various language models against expert clinicians for identification of hallmarks of immunotherapy in breast cancer abstracts. Our results show that pre-trained language models have potential to outperform large language models in identifying very specific (low-level) concepts.
AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of processing long inputs and locating specific information within them, as evidenced by their performance on the Needle in a Haystack (NIAH) test. However, while models excel at recalling surprising information, they still struggle to identify clearly omitted information. We introduce AbsenceBench to assesses LLMs' capacity to detect missing information across three domains: numerical sequences, poetry, and GitHub pull requests. AbsenceBench asks models to identify which pieces of a document were deliberately removed, given access to both the original and edited contexts. Despite the apparent straightforwardness of these tasks, our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet achieve only 69.6% F1-score with a modest average context length of 5K tokens. Our analysis suggests this poor performance stems from a fundamental limitation: Transformer attention mechanisms cannot easily attend to "gaps" in documents since these absences don't correspond to any specific keys that can be attended to. Overall, our results and analysis provide a case study of the close proximity of tasks where models are already superhuman (NIAH) and tasks where models breakdown unexpectedly (AbsenceBench).
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