This paper presents the JGU Mainz submission to the WMT25 Shared Task on LLMs with Limited Resources for Slavic Languages: Machine Translation and Question Answering, focusing on Ukrainian, Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian. For each language, we jointly fine-tune a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model for both tasks with parameter-efficient finetuning. Our pipeline integrates additional translation and multiple-choice question answering (QA) data. For Ukrainian QA, we further use retrieval-augmented generation. We also apply ensembling for QA in Upper and Lower Sorbian. Experiments show that our models outperform the baseline on both tasks.

Statement autoformalization, the automated translation of statements from natural language into formal languages, has seen significant advancements, yet the development of automated evaluation metrics remains limited. Existing metrics for formal statement similarity often fail to balance semantic and structural information. String-based approaches capture syntactic structure but ignore semantic meaning, whereas proof-based methods validate semantic equivalence but disregard structural nuances and, critically, provide no graded similarity score in the event of proof failure. To address these issues, we introduce ASSESS (A Semantic and Structural Evaluation Framework for Statement Similarity), which comprehensively integrates semantic and structural information to provide a continuous similarity score. Our framework first transforms formal statements into Operator Trees to capture their syntactic structure and then computes a similarity score using our novel TransTED (Transformation Tree Edit Distance) Similarity metric, which enhances traditional Tree Edit Distance by incorporating semantic awareness through transformations. For rigorous validation, we present EPLA (Evaluating Provability and Likeness for Autoformalization), a new benchmark of 524 expert-annotated formal statement pairs derived from miniF2F and ProofNet, with labels for both semantic provability and structural likeness. Experiments on EPLA demonstrate that TransTED Similarity outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and the highest Kappa coefficient. The benchmark, and implementation code will be made public soon.

This survey examines multilingual vision-language models that process text and images across languages. We review 31 models and 21 benchmarks, spanning encoder-only and generative architectures, and identify a key tension between language neutrality (consistent cross-lingual representations) and cultural awareness (adaptation to cultural contexts). Current training methods favor neutrality through contrastive learning, while cultural awareness depends on diverse data. Two-thirds of evaluation benchmarks use translation-based approaches prioritizing semantic consistency, though recent work incorporates culturally grounded content. We find discrepancies in cross-lingual capabilities and gaps between training objectives and evaluation goals.

Prior work has shown that two NLP evaluation experiments that report results for the same quality criterion name (e.g. Fluency) do not necessarily evaluate the same aspect of quality, and the comparability implied by the name can be misleading. Not knowing when two evaluations are comparable in this sense means we currently lack the ability to draw reliable conclusions about system quality on the basis of multiple, independently conducted evaluations. This in turn hampers the ability of the field to progress scientifically as a whole, a pervasive issue in NLP since its beginning (Sparck Jones, 1981). It is hard to see how the issue of unclear comparability can be fully addressed other than by the creation of a standard set of quality criterion names and definitions that the several hundred quality criterion names actually in use in the field can be mapped to, and grounded in. Taking a strictly descriptive approach, the QCET Quality Criteria for Evaluation Taxonomy derives a standard set of quality criterion names and definitions from three surveys of evaluations reported in NLP, and structures them into a hierarchy where each parent node captures common aspects of its child nodes. We present QCET and the resources it consists of, and discuss its three main uses in (i) establishing comparability of existing evaluations, (ii) guiding the design of new evaluations, and (iii) assessing regulatory compliance.

ABSTRACT How to make human-interpreter-like read/write decisions for simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) systems? Current state-of-the-art systems formulate SimulST as a multi-turn dialogue task, requiring specialized interleaved training data and relying on computationally expensive large language model (LLM) inference for decision-making. In this paper, we propose SimulSense, a novel framework for SimulST that mimics human interpreters by continuously reading input speech and triggering write decisions to produce translation when a new sense unit is perceived. Experiments against two state-of-the-art baseline systems demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a superior quality-latency tradeoff and substantially improved real-time efficiency, where its decision-making is up to 9.6 faster than the baselines. Index T erms-- simultaneous speech translation, LLM-based speech translation, decision policy, continuous integrate-and-fire 1. INTRODUCTION Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is a challenging task to perform translation in real-time with low latency while maintaining high translation quality.

Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) requires high-quality translations under strict real-time constraints, which traditional encoder-decoder policies with only READ/WRITE actions cannot fully address. We extend the action space of SiMT with four adaptive actions: SENTENCE_CUT, DROP, PAR-TIAL_SUMMARIZATION and PRONOMINALIZATION, which enable real-time restructuring, omission, and simplification while preserving semantic fidelity. We implement these actions in a decoder-only large language model (LLM) framework and construct training references through action-aware prompting. To evaluate both quality and latency, we further develop a latency-aware TTS pipeline that maps textual outputs to speech with realistic timing. Experiments on the ACL60/60 English-Chinese and English-German benchmarks show that our framework consistently improves semantic metrics (e.g., COMET-KIWI) and achieves lower delay (measured by Average Lagging) compared to reference translations and salami-based baselines. Notably, combining DROP and SEN-TENCE_CUT yields the best overall balance between fluency and latency. These results demonstrate that enriching the action space of LLM-based SiMT provides a promising direction for bridging the gap between human and machine interpretation.

Despite major advances in machine translation (MT) in recent years, progress remains limited for many low-resource languages that lack large-scale training data and linguistic resources. Cantonese and Wu Chinese are two Sinitic examples, although each enjoys more than 80 million speakers around the world. In this paper, we introduce SINITICMTER-ROR, a novel dataset that builds on existing parallel corpora to provide error span, error type, and error severity annotations in machine-translated examples from English to Mandarin, Cantonese, and Wu Chinese. Our dataset serves as a resource for the MT community to utilize in fine-tuning models with error detection capabilities, supporting research on translation quality estimation, error-aware generation, and low-resource language evaluation. We report our rigorous annotation process by native speakers, with analyses on inter-annotator agreement, iterative feedback, and patterns in error type and severity.

This report introduces Canary-1B-v2, a fast, robust multilingual model for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speech-to-Text Translation (AST). Built with a FastConformer encoder and Transformer decoder, it supports 25 languages primarily European. The model was trained on 1.7M hours of total data samples, including Granary and NeMo ASR Set 3.0, with non-speech audio added to reduce hallucinations for ASR and AST. We describe its two-stage pre-training and fine-tuning process with dynamic data balancing, as well as experiments with an nGPT encoder. Results show nGPT scales well with massive data, while FastConformer excels after fine-tuning. For timestamps, Canary-1B-v2 uses the NeMo Forced Aligner (NFA) with an auxiliary CTC model, providing reliable segment-level timestamps for ASR and AST. Evaluations show Canary-1B-v2 outperforms Whisper-large-v3 on English ASR while being 10x faster, and delivers competitive multilingual ASR and AST performance against larger models like Seamless-M4T-v2-large and LLM-based systems. We also release Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3, a successor to v2, offering multilingual ASR across the same 25 languages with just 600M parameters.

The ultimate goal of expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is to accurately translate spoken content while preserving the speaker identity and emotional style. However, progress in this field is largely hindered by three key challenges: the scarcity of paired speech data that retains expressive styles, the complexity of multi-stage processing pipelines, and the limited transfer of translation capabilities from large language models (LLMs). In this work, we address these challenges by introducing UniSS, a novel single-stage framework for expressive S2ST. Our approach features carefully designed speech semantic and style modeling, enabling seamless integration with existing text-based LLM frameworks to develop a unified text-speech language model. To transfer translation capabilities from text to speech, we propose a cross-modal chain-of-thought prompting process that progressively aligns audio semantics with text and ensures style preservation in the decoded results. Furthermore, we construct and release a large-scale, high-quality expressive S2ST dataset, UniST, comprising 44.8k hours of data. Experimental results show that UniSS significantly outperforms previous methods in translation fidelity and speech quality while preserving voice, emotion, and duration consistency. Our work establishes a simpler and more effective paradigm for building the next generation of expressive S2ST systems. Audio samples are available at https://cmots.github.io/uniss-demo.

Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages? When Kenneth Wehr started managing the Greenlandic-language version of Wikipedia four years ago, his first act was to delete almost everything. It had to go, he thought, if it had any chance of surviving. Wehr, who's 26, isn't from Greenland--he grew up in Germany--but he had become obsessed with the island, an autonomous Danish territory, after visiting as a teenager. He'd spent years writing obscure Wikipedia articles in his native tongue on virtually everything to do with it. He even ended up moving to Copenhagen to study Greenlandic, a language spoken by some 57,000 mostly Indigenous Inuit people scattered across dozens of far-flung Arctic villages. The Greenlandic-language edition was added to Wikipedia around 2003, just a few years after the site launched in English. By the time Wehr took its helm nearly 20 years later, hundreds of Wikipedians had contributed to it and had collectively written some 1,500 articles totaling over tens of thousands of words.