Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers focused on advancements in machine translation and related technologies. The papers explore innovative methods such as leveraging semi-synthetic data for translation quality estimation, improving streaming translation with speech-to-text alignment, and employing large language models for summarization.

Semi-Synthetic Parallel Data for Translation Quality Estimation: A Case Study of Dataset Building for an Under-Resourced Language Pair

Quality estimation (QE) plays a crucial role in machine translation (MT) workflows, as it serves to evaluate generated outputs that have no reference translations and to determine whether human post-editing or full retranslation is necessary. Yet, developing highly accurate, adaptable and reliable QE systems for under-resourced language pairs remains largely unsolved, due mainly to limited parallel corpora and to diverse language-dependent factors, such as with morphosyntactically complex languages. This study presents a semi-synthetic parallel dataset for English-to-Hebrew QE, generated by creating English sentences based on examples of usage that illustrate typical linguistic patterns, translating them to Hebrew using multiple MT engines, and filtering outputs via BLEU-based selection. Each translated segment was manually evaluated and scored by a linguist, and we also incorporated professionally translated English-Hebrew segments from our own resources, which were assigned the highest quality score. Controlled translation errors were introduced to address linguistic challenges, particularly regarding gender and number agreement, and we trained neural QE models, including BERT and XLM-R, on this dataset to assess sentence-level MT quality. Our findings highlight the impact of dataset size, distributed balance, and error distribution on model performance. We will describe the challenges, methodology and results of our experiments, and specify future directions aimed at improving QE performance. This research contributes to advancing QE models for under resourced language pairs, including morphology-rich languages.

Streaming Translation and Transcription Through Speech-to-Text Causal Alignment

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) has traditionally relied on offline machine translation models coupled with human-engineered heuristics or learned policies. We propose Hikari, a policy-free, fully end-to-end model that performs simultaneous speech-to-text translation and streaming transcription by encoding READ/WRITE decisions into a probabilistic WAIT token mechanism. We also introduce Decoder Time Dilation, a mechanism that reduces autoregressive overhead and ensures a balanced training distribution. Additionally, we present a supervised fine-tuning strategy that trains the model to recover from delays, significantly improving the quality-latency trade-off. Evaluated on English-to-Japanese, German, and Russian, Hikari achieves new state-of-the-art BLEU scores in both low- and high-latency regimes, outperforming recent baselines.

Trust Oriented Explainable AI for Fake News Detection

This article examines the application of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in NLP based fake news detection and compares selected interpretability methods. The work outlines key aspects of disinformation, neural network architectures, and XAI techniques, with a focus on SHAP, LIME, and Integrated Gradients. In the experimental study, classification models were implemented and interpreted using these methods. The results show that XAI enhances model transparency and interpretability while maintaining high detection accuracy. Each method provides distinct explanatory value: SHAP offers detailed local attributions, LIME provides simple and intuitive explanations, and Integrated Gradients performs efficiently with convolutional models. The study also highlights limitations such as computational cost and sensitivity to parameterization. Overall, the findings demonstrate that integrating XAI with NLP is an effective approach to improving the reliability and trustworthiness of fake news detection systems.

BLooP: Zero-Shot Abstractive Summarization using Large Language Models with Bigram Lookahead Promotion

Abstractive summarization requires models to generate summaries that convey information in the source document. While large language models can generate summaries without fine-tuning, they often miss key details and include extraneous information. We propose BLooP (Bigram Lookahead Promotion), a simple training-free decoding intervention that encourages large language models (LLMs) to generate tokens that form bigrams from the source document. BLooP operates through a hash table lookup at each decoding step, requiring no training, fine-tuning, or model modification. We demonstrate improvements in ROUGE and BARTScore for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407, and Gemma-2-9b-it on CNN/DM, CCSum, Multi-News, and SciTLDR. Human evaluation shows that BLooP significantly improves faithfulness without reducing readability. We make the code available at https://github.com/varuniyer/BLooP

EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely integrated into diffusion frameworks primarily as text encoders to tackle complex tasks such as spatial reasoning. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical limitations: (i) MLLMs text encoder exhibits insufficient reasoning depth. Single-step encoding fails to activate the Chain-of-Thought process, which is essential for MLLMs to provide accurate guidance for complex tasks. (ii) The guidance remains invariant during the decoding process. Invariant guidance during decoding prevents DiT from progressively decomposing complex instructions into actionable denoising steps, even with correct MLLM encodings. To this end, we propose Endogenous Chain-of-Thought (EndoCoT), a novel framework that first activates MLLMs' reasoning potential by iteratively refining latent thought states through an iterative thought guidance module, and then bridges these states to the DiT's denoising process. Second, a terminal thought grounding module is applied to ensure the reasoning trajectory remains grounded in textual supervision by aligning the final state with ground-truth answers. With these two components, the MLLM text encoder delivers meticulously reasoned guidance, enabling the DiT to execute it progressively and ultimately solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks (e.g., Maze, TSP, VSP, and Sudoku) achieve an average accuracy of 92.1%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 8.3 percentage points. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://lennoxdai.github.io/EndoCoT-Webpage/.