Machine Translation Digest for Jun 19 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers focused on advancing language processing and translation technologies. The papers explore diverse approaches to improving language models and data handling for low-resource languages, from developing specialized datasets and models for Vietnamese and Nepali, to innovative strategies for coordinating smaller models in data labeling and enhancing open-ended generation capabilities.
A Vietnamese Dataset for Text Segmentation and Multiple Choices Reading Comprehension
Vietnamese, the 20th most spoken language with over 102 million native speakers, lacks robust resources for key natural language processing tasks such as text segmentation and machine reading comprehension (MRC). To address this gap, we present VSMRC, the Vietnamese Text Segmentation and Multiple-Choice Reading Comprehension Dataset. Sourced from Vietnamese Wikipedia, our dataset includes 15,942 documents for text segmentation and 16,347 synthetic multiple-choice question-answer pairs generated with human quality assurance, ensuring a reliable and diverse resource. Experiments show that mBERT consistently outperforms monolingual models on both tasks, achieving an accuracy of 88.01% on MRC test set and an F1 score of 63.15\% on text segmentation test set. Our analysis reveals that multilingual models excel in NLP tasks for Vietnamese, suggesting potential applications to other under-resourced languages. VSMRC is available at HuggingFace
From General to Targeted Rewards: Surpassing GPT-4 in Open-Ended Long-Context Generation
Current research on long-form context in Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the understanding of long-contexts, the Open-ended Long Text Generation (Open-LTG) remains insufficiently explored. Training a long-context generation model requires curation of gold standard reference data, which is typically nonexistent for informative Open-LTG tasks. However, previous methods only utilize general assessments as reward signals, which limits accuracy. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProxyReward, an innovative reinforcement learning (RL) based framework, which includes a dataset and a reward signal computation method. Firstly, ProxyReward Dataset generation is accomplished through simple prompts that enables the model to create automatically, obviating extensive labeled data or significant manual effort. Secondly, ProxyReward Signal offers a targeted evaluation of information comprehensiveness and accuracy for specific questions. The experimental results indicate that our method ProxyReward surpasses even GPT-4-Turbo. It can significantly enhance performance by 20% on the Open-LTG task when training widely used open-source models, while also surpassing the LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Our work presents effective methods to enhance the ability of LLMs to address complex open-ended questions posed by human.
From LLM-anation to LLM-orchestrator: Coordinating Small Models for Data Labeling
Although the annotation paradigm based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has made significant breakthroughs in recent years, its actual deployment still has two core bottlenecks: first, the cost of calling commercial APIs in large-scale annotation is very expensive; second, in scenarios that require fine-grained semantic understanding, such as sentiment classification and toxicity classification, the annotation accuracy of LLMs is even lower than that of Small Language Models (SLMs) dedicated to this field. To address these problems, we propose a new paradigm of multi-model cooperative annotation and design a fully automatic annotation framework AutoAnnotator based on this. Specifically, AutoAnnotator consists of two layers. The upper-level meta-controller layer uses the generation and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to select SLMs for annotation, automatically generate annotation code and verify difficult samples; the lower-level task-specialist layer consists of multiple SLMs that perform annotation through multi-model voting. In addition, we use the difficult samples obtained by the secondary review of the meta-controller layer as the reinforcement learning set and fine-tune the SLMs in stages through a continual learning strategy, thereby improving the generalization of SLMs. Extensive experiments show that AutoAnnotator outperforms existing open-source/API LLMs in zero-shot, one-shot, CoT, and majority voting settings. Notably, AutoAnnotator reduces the annotation cost by 74.15% compared to directly annotating with GPT-3.5-turbo, while still improving the accuracy by 6.21%. Project page: https://github.com/Zhaiyuan-Ji/AutoAnnotator.
NepaliGPT: A Generative Language Model for the Nepali Language
After the release of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained huge popularity in recent days and thousands of variants of LLMs have been released. However, there is no generative language model for the Nepali language, due to which other downstream tasks, including fine-tuning, have not been explored yet. To fill this research gap in the Nepali NLP space, this research proposes \textit{NepaliGPT}, a generative large language model tailored specifically for the Nepali language. This research introduces an advanced corpus for the Nepali language collected from several sources, called the Devanagari Corpus. Likewise, the research introduces the first NepaliGPT benchmark dataset comprised of 4,296 question-answer pairs in the Nepali language. The proposed LLM NepaliGPT achieves the following metrics in text generation: Perplexity of 26.32245, ROUGE-1 score of 0.2604, causal coherence of 81.25\%, and causal consistency of 85.41\%.
End-to-End Speech Translation for Low-Resource Languages Using Weakly Labeled Data
The scarcity of high-quality annotated data presents a significant challenge in developing effective end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) systems, particularly for low-resource languages. This paper explores the hypothesis that weakly labeled data can be used to build ST models for low-resource language pairs. We constructed speech-to-text translation datasets with the help of bitext mining using state-of-the-art sentence encoders. We mined the multilingual Shrutilipi corpus to build Shrutilipi-anuvaad, a dataset comprising ST data for language pairs Bengali-Hindi, Malayalam-Hindi, Odia-Hindi, and Telugu-Hindi. We created multiple versions of training data with varying degrees of quality and quantity to investigate the effect of quality versus quantity of weakly labeled data on ST model performance. Results demonstrate that ST systems can be built using weakly labeled data, with performance comparable to massive multi-modal multilingual baselines such as SONAR and SeamlessM4T.
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