Machine Translation Digest for Oct 19 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring evaluation and interpretability in large language models (LLMs). The papers focus on multilingual benchmarks and component-level evaluations to enhance understanding and error analysis in LLMs across various contexts, including lexical comprehension, discourse tracking, and optimization modeling. These efforts aim to improve the transparency and performance of LLMs in complex tasks.
LC-Eval: A Bilingual Multi-Task Evaluation Benchmark for Long-Context Understanding
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated sophisticated capabilities, including the ability to process and comprehend extended contexts. These emergent capabilities necessitate rigorous evaluation methods to effectively assess their performance in long-context understanding. In this paper, we present \textbf{LC-Eval}, a bilingual, multi-task evaluation benchmark designed to evaluate long-context understanding in English and Arabic, targeting context lengths ranging from 4k to over 128k tokens. LC-Eval introduces four novel and challenging tasks: multi-document question answering, bilingual question answering, claim verification within a paragraph, and multiple-choice questions based on long contexts. These tasks are designed to assess LLMs' abilities in deep reasoning, document comprehension, information tracing, and bilingual information extraction and understanding. The benchmark includes datasets in both Arabic and English for each task, allowing for a comparative analysis of their performance across different text genres. Evaluations were conducted on both open-weight and closed LLMs, with results indicating that LC-Eval presents significant challenges. Even high-performing models, such as GPT-4o, struggled with certain tasks, highlighting the complexity and rigor of the benchmark.
ChiKhaPo: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Lexical Comprehension and Generation in Large Language Models
Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact that LLMs lack basic linguistic competence in the vast majority of the world's 3800+ written languages. We introduce ChiKhaPo, consisting of 8 subtasks of varying difficulty designed to evaluate the lexical comprehension and generation abilities of generative models. ChiKhaPo draws on existing lexicons, monolingual data, and bitext, and provides coverage for 2700+ languages for 2 subtasks, surpassing any existing benchmark in terms of language coverage. We further show that 6 SOTA models struggle on our benchmark, and discuss the factors contributing to performance scores, including language family, language resourcedness, task, and comprehension versus generation directions. With ChiKhaPo, we hope to enable and encourage the massively multilingual benchmarking of LLMs.
Peering Inside the Black Box: Uncovering LLM Errors in Optimization Modelling through Component-Level Evaluation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to convert natural language descriptions into mathematical optimization formulations. Current evaluations often treat formulations as a whole, relying on coarse metrics like solution accuracy or runtime, which obscure structural or numerical errors. In this study, we present a comprehensive, component-level evaluation framework for LLM-generated formulations. Beyond the conventional optimality gap, our framework introduces metrics such as precision and recall for decision variables and constraints, constraint and objective root mean squared error (RMSE), and efficiency indicators based on token usage and latency. We evaluate GPT-5, LLaMA 3.1 Instruct, and DeepSeek Math across optimization problems of varying complexity under six prompting strategies. Results show that GPT-5 consistently outperforms other models, with chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and modular prompting proving most effective. Analysis indicates that solver performance depends primarily on high constraint recall and low constraint RMSE, which together ensure structural correctness and solution reliability. Constraint precision and decision variable metrics play secondary roles, while concise outputs enhance computational efficiency. These findings highlight three principles for NLP-to-optimization modeling: (i) Complete constraint coverage prevents violations, (ii) minimizing constraint RMSE ensures solver-level accuracy, and (iii) concise outputs improve computational efficiency. The proposed framework establishes a foundation for fine-grained, diagnostic evaluation of LLMs in optimization modeling.
DiscoTrack: A Multilingual LLM Benchmark for Discourse Tracking
Recent LLM benchmarks have tested models on a range of phenomena, but are still focused primarily on natural language understanding for extraction of explicit information, such as QA or summarization, with responses often tar- geting information from individual sentences. We are still lacking more challenging, and im- portantly also multilingual, benchmarks focus- ing on implicit information and pragmatic infer- ences across larger documents in the context of discourse tracking: integrating and aggregating information across sentences, paragraphs and multiple speaker utterances. To this end, we present DiscoTrack, an LLM benchmark target- ing a range of tasks across 12 languages and four levels of discourse understanding: salience recognition, entity tracking, discourse relations and bridging inference. Our evaluation shows that these tasks remain challenging, even for state-of-the-art models.
Interpretability Framework for LLMs in Undergraduate Calculus
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in education, yet their correctness alone does not capture the quality, reliability, or pedagogical validity of their problem-solving behavior, especially in mathematics, where multistep logic, symbolic reasoning, and conceptual clarity are critical. Conventional evaluation methods largely focus on final answer accuracy and overlook the reasoning process. To address this gap, we introduce a novel interpretability framework for analyzing LLM-generated solutions using undergraduate calculus problems as a representative domain. Our approach combines reasoning flow extraction and decomposing solutions into semantically labeled operations and concepts with prompt ablation analysis to assess input salience and output stability. Using structured metrics such as reasoning complexity, phrase sensitivity, and robustness, we evaluated the model behavior on real Calculus I to III university exams. Our findings revealed that LLMs often produce syntactically fluent yet conceptually flawed solutions, with reasoning patterns sensitive to prompt phrasing and input variation. This framework enables fine-grained diagnosis of reasoning failures, supports curriculum alignment, and informs the design of interpretable AI-assisted feedback tools. This is the first study to offer a structured, quantitative, and pedagogically grounded framework for interpreting LLM reasoning in mathematics education, laying the foundation for the transparent and responsible deployment of AI in STEM learning environments.
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