Machine Translation
VN-MTEB: Vietnamese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark
Pham, Loc, Luu, Tung, Vo, Thu, Nguyen, Minh, Hoang, Viet
Vietnam ranks among the top countries in terms of both internet traffic and online toxicity. As a result, implementing embedding models for recommendation and content control duties in applications is crucial. However, a lack of large-scale test datasets, both in volume and task diversity, makes it tricky for scientists to effectively evaluate AI models before deploying them in real-world, large-scale projects. To solve this important problem, we introduce a Vietnamese benchmark, VN-MTEB for embedding models, which we created by translating a large number of English samples from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark using our new automated framework. We leverage the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and cutting-edge embedding models to conduct translation and filtering processes to retain high-quality samples, guaranteeing a natural flow of language and semantic fidelity while preserving named entity recognition (NER) and code snippets. Our comprehensive benchmark consists of 41 datasets from six tasks specifically designed for Vietnamese text embeddings. In our analysis, we find that bigger and more complex models using Rotary Positional Embedding outperform those using Absolute Positional Embedding in embedding tasks. Datasets are available at HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/collections/GreenNode/vn-mteb-68871433f0f7573b8e1a6686
iLSU-T: an Open Dataset for Uruguayan Sign Language Translation
Stassi, Ariel E., Boria, Yanina, Di Martino, J. Matรญas, Randall, Gregory
Automatic sign language translation has gained particular interest in the computer vision and computational linguistics communities in recent years. Given each sign language country particularities, machine translation requires local data to develop new techniques and adapt existing ones. This work presents iLSU T, an open dataset of interpreted Uruguayan Sign Language RGB videos with audio and text transcriptions. This type of multimodal and curated data is paramount for developing novel approaches to understand or generate tools for sign language processing. iLSU T comprises more than 185 hours of interpreted sign language videos from public TV broadcasting. It covers diverse topics and includes the participation of 18 professional interpreters of sign language. A series of experiments using three state of the art translation algorithms is presented. The aim is to establish a baseline for this dataset and evaluate its usefulness and the proposed pipeline for data processing. The experiments highlight the need for more localized datasets for sign language translation and understanding, which are critical for developing novel tools to improve accessibility and inclusion of all individuals. Our data and code can be accessed.
Mind the Language Gap in Digital Humanities: LLM-Aided Translation of SKOS Thesauri
Kraus, Felix, Blumenrรถhr, Nicolas, Tonne, Danah, Streit, Achim
We introduce WOKIE, an open-source, modular, and ready-to-use pipeline for the automated translation of SKOS thesauri. This work addresses a critical need in the Digital Humanities (DH), where language diversity can limit access, reuse, and semantic interoperability of knowledge resources. WOKIE combines external translation services with targeted refinement using Large Language Models (LLMs), balancing translation quality, scalability, and cost. Designed to run on everyday hardware and be easily extended, the application requires no prior expertise in machine translation or LLMs. We evaluate WOKIE across several DH thesauri in 15 languages with different parameters, translation services and LLMs, systematically analysing translation quality, performance, and ontology matching improvements. Our results show that WOKIE is suitable to enhance the accessibility, reuse, and cross-lingual interoperability of thesauri by hurdle-free automated translation and improved ontology matching performance, supporting more inclusive and multilingual research infrastructures.
AI-Driven Generation of Old English: A Framework for Low-Resource Languages
Alva, Rodrigo Gabriel Salazar, Nuรฑez, Matรญas, Lรณpez, Cristian, Arista, Javier Martรญn
Preserving ancient languages is essential for understanding humanity's cultural and linguistic heritage, yet Old English remains critically under-resourced, limiting its accessibility to modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We present a scalable framework that uses advanced large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality Old English texts, addressing this gap. Our approach combines parameter-efficient fine-tuning (Low-Rank Adaptation, LoRA), data augmentation via backtranslation, and a dual-agent pipeline that separates the tasks of content generation (in English) and translation (into Old English). Evaluation with automated metrics (BLEU, METEOR, and CHRF) shows significant improvements over baseline models, with BLEU scores increasing from 26 to over 65 for English-to-Old English translation. Expert human assessment also confirms high grammatical accuracy and stylistic fidelity in the generated texts. Beyond expanding the Old English corpus, our method offers a practical blueprint for revitalizing other endangered languages, effectively uniting AI innovation with the goals of cultural preservation.
HITSZ's End-To-End Speech Translation Systems Combining Sequence-to-Sequence Auto Speech Recognition Model and Indic Large Language Model for IWSLT 2025 in Indic Track
Wei, Xuchen, Wu, Yangxin, Zhang, Yaoyin, Liu, Henglyu, Chen, Kehai, Bai, Xuefeng, Zhang, Min
This paper presents HITSZ's submission for the IWSLT 2025 Indic track, focusing on speech-to-text translation (ST) for English-to-Indic and Indic-to-English language pairs. To enhance translation quality in this low-resource scenario, we propose an end-to-end system integrating the pre-trained Whisper automated speech recognition (ASR) model with Krutrim, an Indic-specialized large language model (LLM). Experimental results demonstrate that our end-to-end system achieved average BLEU scores of $28.88$ for English-to-Indic directions and $27.86$ for Indic-to-English directions. Furthermore, we investigated the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method. While this method showed potential for significant translation quality improvements on successfully parsed outputs (e.g. a $13.84$ BLEU increase for Tamil-to-English), we observed challenges in ensuring the model consistently adheres to the required CoT output format.
Seed LiveInterpret 2.0: End-to-end Simultaneous Speech-to-speech Translation with Your Voice
Cheng, Shanbo, Bao, Yu, Huang, Zhichao, Lu, Yu, Peng, Ningxin, Xu, Lu, Yu, Runsheng, Cao, Rong, Du, Yujiao, Han, Ting, Hu, Yuxiang, Li, Zeyang, Liu, Sitong, Ma, Shengtao, Pan, Shiguang, Xiao, Jiongchen, Xu, Nuo, Yang, Meng, Ye, Rong, Yu, Yiming, Zhang, Jun, Zhang, Ruofei, Zhang, Wanyi, Zhu, Wenhao, Zou, Liehao, Lu, Lu, Wang, Yuxuan, Wu, Yonghui
Simultaneous Interpretation (SI) represents one of the most daunting frontiers in the translation industry, with product-level automatic systems long plagued by intractable challenges: subpar transcription and translation quality, lack of real-time speech generation, multi-speaker confusion, and translated speech inflation, especially in long-form discourses. In this study, we introduce Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0, an end-to-end SI model that delivers high-fidelity, ultra-low-latency speech-to-speech generation with voice cloning capabilities. As a fully operational product-level solution, Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0 tackles these challenges head-on through our novel duplex speech-to-speech understanding-generating framework. Experimental results demonstrate that through large-scale pretraining and reinforcement learning, the model achieves a significantly better balance between translation accuracy and latency, validated by human interpreters to exceed 70% correctness in complex scenarios. Notably, Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0 outperforms commercial SI solutions by significant margins in translation quality, while slashing the average latency of cloned speech from nearly 10 seconds to a near-real-time 3 seconds, which is around a near 70% reduction that drastically enhances practical usability.
Advancing Large Language Models for Tibetan with Curated Data and Continual Pre-Training
Pan, Leiyu, Xiong, Bojian, Yang, Lei, Jin, Renren, Zhang, Shaowei, Chen, Yue, Shi, Ling, Zhou, Jiang, Wu, Junru, Wang, Zhen, Peng, Jianxiang, Xiao, Juesi, Dong, Tianyu, Han, Zhuowen, Chen, Zhuo, Ren, Yuqi, Xiong, Deyi
Large language models have achieved remarkable progress across many languages. However, Tibetan, as a representative low-resource language, is particularly underrepresented in existing models due to the scarcity of high-quality training corpora. To address this gap, we curate the largest Tibetan pre-training corpus to date, aggregating data from diverse sources and applying a dedicated data cleaning and processing pipeline tailored for Tibetan. With the curated data, we continue pre/post-training a multilingual base model to enhance its generative capabilities in Tibetan. To evaluate the Tibetan capabilities of the model, we create new high-quality Tibetan benchmarks, and complement them with existing public benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our model consistently and significantly outperforms both open-source models of similar scale and Tibetan-tailored models across a wide range of tasks.
ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech
Kashyap, Gautam Siddharth, Azeez, Mohammad Anas, Ali, Rafiq, Siddiqui, Zohaib Hasan, Gao, Jiechao, Naseem, Usman
Hate speech targeting children on social media is a serious and growing problem, yet current NLP systems struggle to detect it effectively. This gap exists mainly because existing datasets focus on adults, lack age specific labels, miss nuanced linguistic cues, and are often too small for robust modeling. To address this, we introduce ChildGuard, the first large scale English dataset dedicated to hate speech aimed at children. It contains 351,877 annotated examples from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube, labeled by three age groups: younger children (under 11), pre teens (11--12), and teens (13--17). The dataset is split into two subsets for fine grained analysis: a contextual subset (157K) focusing on discourse level features, and a lexical subset (194K) emphasizing word-level sentiment and vocabulary. Benchmarking state of the art hate speech models on ChildGuard reveals notable drops in performance, highlighting the challenges of detecting child directed hate speech.
Minimal Pair-Based Evaluation of Code-Switching
There is a lack of an evaluation methodology that estimates the extent to which large language models (LLMs) use code-switching (CS) in the same way as bilinguals. Existing methods do not have wide language coverage, fail to account for the diverse range of CS phenomena, or do not scale. We propose an intervention based on minimal pairs of CS. Each minimal pair contains one naturally occurring CS sentence and one minimally manipulated variant. We collect up to 1,000 such pairs each for 11 language pairs. Our human experiments show that, for every language pair, bilinguals consistently prefer the naturally occurring CS sentence. Meanwhile our experiments with current LLMs show that the larger the model, the more consistently it assigns higher probability to the naturally occurring CS sentence than to the variant. In accordance with theoretical claims, the largest probability differences arise in those pairs where the manipulated material consisted of closed-class words.
LLaVA-NeuMT: Selective Layer-Neuron Modulation for Efficient Multilingual Multimodal Translation
Wei, Jingxuan, Jia, Caijun, Chen, Qi, Cai, Yujun, Sun, Linzhuang, Zhang, Xiangxiang, Wu, Gaowei, Yu, Bihui
Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) enhances translation quality by incorporating visual context, helping to resolve textual ambiguities. While existing MMT methods perform well in bilingual settings, extending them to multilingual translation remains challenging due to cross-lingual interference and ineffective parameter-sharing strategies. To address this, we propose LLaVA-NeuMT, a novel multimodal multilingual translation framework that explicitly models language-specific and language-agnostic representations to mitigate multilingual interference. Our approach consists of a layer selection mechanism that identifies the most informative layers for different language pairs and a neuron-level adaptation strategy that dynamically selects language-specific and agnostic neurons to improve translation quality while reducing redundancy. We conduct extensive experiments on the M3-Multi30K and M3-AmbigCaps datasets, demonstrating that LLaVA-NeuMT, while fine-tuning only 40\% of the model parameters, surpasses full fine-tuning approaches and ultimately achieves SOTA results on both datasets. Our analysis further provides insights into the importance of selected layers and neurons in multimodal multilingual adaptation, offering an efficient and scalable solution to cross-lingual adaptation in multimodal translation.