Here is today's selection of machine translation and NLP papers. The featured works explore innovative ways to enhance machine translation and language models, including leveraging MT encoders for word alignment, improving LLM training methods, and advancing sign language translation techniques. Additionally, a comprehensive survey addresses the integration of state-of-the-art NLP in the battery life cycle domain.

TransAlign: Machine Translation Encoders are Strong Word Aligners, Too

In the absence of sizable training data for most world languages and NLP tasks, translation-based strategies such as translate-test -- evaluating on noisy source language data translated from the target language -- and translate-train -- training on noisy target language data translated from the source language -- have been established as competitive approaches for cross-lingual transfer (XLT). For token classification tasks, these strategies require label projection: mapping the labels from each token in the original sentence to its counterpart(s) in the translation. To this end, it is common to leverage multilingual word aligners (WAs) derived from encoder language models such as mBERT or LaBSE. Despite obvious associations between machine translation (MT) and WA, research on extracting alignments with MT models is largely limited to exploiting cross-attention in encoder-decoder architectures, yielding poor WA results. In this work, in contrast, we propose TransAlign, a novel word aligner that utilizes the encoder of a massively multilingual MT model. We show that TransAlign not only achieves strong WA performance but substantially outperforms popular WA and state-of-the-art non-WA-based label projection methods in MT-based XLT for token classification.

From the Rock Floor to the Cloud: A Systematic Survey of State-of-the-Art NLP in Battery Life Cycle

We present a comprehensive systematic survey of the application of natural language processing (NLP) along the entire battery life cycle, instead of one stage or method, and introduce a novel technical language processing (TLP) framework for the EU's proposed digital battery passport (DBP) and other general battery predictions. We follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method and employ three reputable databases or search engines, including Google Scholar, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Xplore (IEEE Xplore), and Scopus. Consequently, we assessed 274 scientific papers before the critical review of the final 66 relevant papers. We publicly provide artifacts of the review for validation and reproducibility. The findings show that new NLP tasks are emerging in the battery domain, which facilitate materials discovery and other stages of the life cycle. Notwithstanding, challenges remain, such as the lack of standard benchmarks. Our proposed TLP framework, which incorporates agentic AI and optimized prompts, will be apt for tackling some of the challenges.

Training LLMs Beyond Next Token Prediction -- Filling the Mutual Information Gap

Optimizing training performance in large language models (LLMs) remains an essential challenge, particularly in improving model performance while maintaining computational costs. This work challenges the conventional approach of training LLMs using next-token prediction (NTP), arguing that by predicting information-rich tokens during training, there is a more effective way to train LLMs. We investigate the impact of the proposed solution in three kinds of tasks for LLMs: arithmetic, multi-label classification of text, and natural-language generation. This work offers a principled approach to optimizing LLM training, advancing both model performance and theoretical understanding of the target-token selection strategies.

MedCalc-Eval and MedCalc-Env: Advancing Medical Calculation Capabilities of Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) enter the medical domain, most benchmarks evaluate them on question answering or descriptive reasoning, overlooking quantitative reasoning critical to clinical decision-making. Existing datasets like MedCalc-Bench cover few calculation tasks and fail to reflect real-world computational scenarios. We introduce MedCalc-Eval, the largest benchmark for assessing LLMs' medical calculation abilities, comprising 700+ tasks across two types: equation-based (e.g., Cockcroft-Gault, BMI, BSA) and rule-based scoring systems (e.g., Apgar, Glasgow Coma Scale). These tasks span diverse specialties including internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and cardiology, offering a broader and more challenging evaluation setting. To improve performance, we further develop MedCalc-Env, a reinforcement learning environment built on the InternBootcamp framework, enabling multi-step clinical reasoning and planning. Fine-tuning a Qwen2.5-32B model within this environment achieves state-of-the-art results on MedCalc-Eval, with notable gains in numerical sensitivity, formula selection, and reasoning robustness. Remaining challenges include unit conversion, multi-condition logic, and contextual understanding. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/maokangkun/MedCalc-Eval.

POSESTITCH-SLT: Linguistically Inspired Pose-Stitching for End-to-End Sign Language Translation

Sign language translation remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of large-scale, sentence-aligned datasets. Prior arts have focused on various feature extraction and architectural changes to support neural machine translation for sign languages. We propose POSESTITCH-SLT, a novel pre-training scheme that is inspired by linguistic-templates-based sentence generation technique. With translation comparison on two sign language datasets, How2Sign and iSign, we show that a simple transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture outperforms the prior art when considering template-generated sentence pairs in training. We achieve BLEU-4 score improvements from 1.97 to 4.56 on How2Sign and from 0.55 to 3.43 on iSign, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods for pose-based gloss-free translation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of template-driven synthetic supervision in low-resource sign language settings.