Most existing work in data selection for In-Context Learning (ICL) has focused on constructing demonstrations from ground truth annotations, with limited attention given to selecting reliable self-generated annotations. In this work, we propose a three-step semi-supervised ICL framework: annotation generation, demonstration selection, and semi-supervised inference. Our baseline, Naive-SemiICL, which prompts select high-confidence self-generated demonstrations for ICL prompting, outperforms a 16-shot baseline by an average of 9.94% across 16 datasets. We further introduce IterPSD, an annotation approach that refines pseudo-demonstrations iteratively, achieving up to 6.8% additional gains in classification tasks. Lastly, we reveal a scaling law for semi-supervised ICL, where models achieve optimal performance with over 1,000 demonstrations.

Word-level quality estimation (QE) detects erroneous spans in machine translations, which can direct and facilitate human post-editing. While the accuracy of word-level QE systems has been assessed extensively, their usability and downstream influence on the speed, quality and editing choices of human post-editing remain understudied. Our QE4PE study investigates the impact of word-level QE on machine translation (MT) post-editing in a realistic setting involving 42 professional post-editors across two translation directions. We compare four error-span highlight modalities, including supervised and uncertainty-based word-level QE methods, for identifying potential errors in the outputs of a state-of-the-art neural MT model. Post-editing effort and productivity are estimated by behavioral logs, while quality improvements are assessed by word- and segment-level human annotation. We find that domain, language and editors' speed are critical factors in determining highlights' effectiveness, with modest differences between human-made and automated QE highlights underlining a gap between accuracy and usability in professional workflows.

Simultaneous translation of unbounded streaming speech remains a challenging problem due to the need for effectively processing the history speech context and past translations so that quality and latency, including computation overhead, can be balanced. Most prior works assume pre-segmented speech, limiting their real-world applicability. In this paper, we propose InfiniSST, a novel approach that formulates SST as a multi-turn dialogue task, enabling seamless translation of unbounded speech. We construct translation trajectories and robust segments from MuST-C with multi-latency augmentation during training and develop a key-value (KV) cache management strategy to facilitate efficient inference. Experiments on MuST-C En-Es, En-De, and En-Zh demonstrate that InfiniSST reduces computation-aware latency by 0.5 to 1 second while maintaining the same translation quality compared to baselines. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of our data construction and cache management strategy. We release the code at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/InfiniSST

As speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two innovative approaches: (1) the injection of perturbation into source audio, and (2) the generation of adversarial music designed to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks prove effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. The implications of this research extend beyond immediate security concerns, shedding light on the interpretability and robustness of neural speech processing systems. Our findings underscore the need for advanced defense mechanisms and more resilient architectures in the realm of audio systems. More details and samples can be found at https://adv-st.github.io.

Accurate translation of bug reports is critical for efficient collaboration in global software development. In this study, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of machine translation (MT) performance on bug reports, analyzing the capabilities of DeepL, AWS Translate, and ChatGPT using data from the Visual Studio Code GitHub repository, specifically focusing on reports labeled with the english-please tag. To thoroughly assess the accuracy and effectiveness of each system, we employ multiple machine translation metrics, including BLEU, BERTScore, COMET, METEOR, and ROUGE. Our findings indicate that DeepL consistently outperforms the other systems across most automatic metrics, demonstrating strong lexical and semantic alignment. AWS Translate performs competitively, particularly in METEOR, while ChatGPT lags in key metrics. This study underscores the importance of domain adaptation for translating technical texts and offers guidance for integrating automated translation into bug-triaging workflows. Moreover, our results establish a foundation for future research to refine machine translation solutions for specialized engineering contexts. The code and dataset for this paper are available at GitHub: https://github.com/av9ash/gitbugs/tree/main/multilingual.

Multilingual hallucination detection stands as an underexplored challenge, which the Mu-SHROOM shared task seeks to address. In this work, we propose an efficient, training-free LLM prompting strategy that enhances detection by translating multilingual text spans into English. Our approach achieves competitive rankings across multiple languages, securing two first positions in low-resource languages. The consistency of our results highlights the effectiveness of our translation strategy for hallucination detection, demonstrating its applicability regardless of the source language.

Speech to speech translation (S2ST) is a transformative technology that bridges global communication gaps, enabling real time multilingual interactions in diplomacy, tourism, and international trade. Our review examines the evolution of S2ST, comparing traditional cascade models which rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), and text to speech (TTS) components with newer end to end and direct speech translation (DST) models that bypass intermediate text representations. While cascade models offer modularity and optimized components, they suffer from error propagation, increased latency, and loss of prosody. In contrast, direct S2ST models retain speaker identity, reduce latency, and improve translation naturalness by preserving vocal characteristics and prosody. However, they remain limited by data sparsity, high computational costs, and generalization challenges for low-resource languages. The current work critically evaluates these approaches, their tradeoffs, and future directions for improving real time multilingual communication.

Sign language machine translation (SLMT) -- the task of automatically translating between sign and spoken languages or between sign languages -- is a complex task within the field of NLP. Its multi-modal and non-linear nature require the joint efforts of sign language (SL) linguists, technical experts and SL users. Effective user involvement is a challenge that can be addressed through co-creation. Co-creation has been formally defined in many fields, e.g. business, marketing, educational and others, however in NLP and in particular in SLMT there is no formal, widely accepted definition. Starting from the inception and evolution of co-creation across various fields over time, we develop a relationship typology to address the collaboration between deaf, Hard of Hearing and hearing researchers and the co-creation with SL-users. We compare this new typology to the guiding principles of participatory design for NLP. We, then, assess 110 articles from the perspective of involvement of SL users and highlight the lack of involvement of the sign language community or users in decision-making processes required for effective co-creation. Finally, we derive formal guidelines for co-creation for SLMT which take the dynamic nature of co-creation throughout the life cycle of a research project into account.

Question answering (QA) requires accurately aligning user questions with structured queries, a process often limited by the scarcity of high-quality query-natural language (Q-NL) pairs. To overcome this, we present Q-NL Verifier, an approach to generating high-quality synthetic pairs of queries and NL translations. Our approach relies on large language models (LLMs) to generate semantically precise natural language paraphrases of structured queries. Building on these synthetic Q-NL pairs, we introduce a learned verifier component that automatically determines whether a generated paraphrase is semantically equivalent to the original query. Our experiments with the well-known LC-QuAD 2.0 benchmark show that Q-NL Verifier generalizes well to paraphrases from other models and even human-authored translations. Our approach strongly aligns with human judgments across varying query complexities and outperforms existing NLP metrics in assessing semantic correctness. We also integrate the verifier into QA pipelines, showing that verifier-filtered synthetic data has significantly higher quality in terms of translation correctness and enhances NL to Q translation accuracy. Lastly, we release an updated version of the LC-QuAD 2.0 benchmark containing our synthetic Q-NL pairs and verifier scores, offering a new resource for robust and scalable QA.

In Switzerland legal translation is uniquely important due to the country's four official languages and requirements for multilingual legal documentation. However, this process traditionally relies on professionals who must be both legal experts and skilled translators -- creating bottlenecks and impacting effective access to justice. To address this challenge, we introduce SwiLTra-Bench, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark of over 180K aligned Swiss legal translation pairs comprising laws, headnotes, and press releases across all Swiss languages along with English, designed to evaluate LLM-based translation systems. Our systematic evaluation reveals that frontier models achieve superior translation performance across all document types, while specialized translation systems excel specifically in laws but under-perform in headnotes. Through rigorous testing and human expert validation, we demonstrate that while fine-tuning open SLMs significantly improves their translation quality, they still lag behind the best zero-shot prompted frontier models such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Additionally, we present SwiLTra-Judge, a specialized LLM evaluation system that aligns best with human expert assessments.