Machine Translation
BiMax: Bidirectional MaxSim Score for Document-Level Alignment
Wang, Xiaotian, Utsuro, Takehito, Nagata, Masaaki
Document alignment is necessary for the hierarchical mining (Baรฑรณn et al., 2020; Morishita et al., 2022), which aligns documents across source and target languages within the same web domain. Several high precision sentence embedding-based methods have been developed, such as TK-PERT (Thompson and Koehn, 2020) and Optimal Transport (OT) (Clark et al., 2019; El-Kishky and Guzmรกn, 2020). However, given the massive scale of web mining data, both accuracy and speed must be considered. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual Bidirectional Maxsim score (BiMax) for computing doc-to-doc similarity, to improve efficiency compared to the OT method. Consequently, on the WMT16 bilingual document alignment task, BiMax attains accuracy comparable to OT with an approximate 100-fold speed increase. Meanwhile, we also conduct a comprehensive analysis to investigate the performance of current state-of-the-art multilingual sentence embedding models. All the alignment methods in this paper are publicly available as a tool called EmbDA (https://github.com/EternalEdenn/EmbDA).
On Non-interactive Evaluation of Animal Communication Translators
Paradise, Orr, Gruber, David F., Kalai, Adam Tauman
If you had an AI Whale-to-English translator, how could you validate whether or not it is working? Does one need to interact with the animals or rely on grounded observations such as temperature? We provide theoretical and proof-of-concept experimental evidence suggesting that interaction and even observations may not be necessary for sufficiently complex languages. One may be able to evaluate translators solely by their English outputs, offering potential advantages in terms of safety, ethics, and cost. This is an instance of machine translation quality evaluation (MTQE) without any reference translations available. A key challenge is identifying ``hallucinations,'' false translations which may appear fluent and plausible. We propose using segment-by-segment translation together with the classic NLP shuffle test to evaluate translators. The idea is to translate animal communication, turn by turn, and evaluate how often the resulting translations make more sense in order than permuted. Proof-of-concept experiments on data-scarce human languages and constructed languages demonstrate the potential utility of this evaluation methodology. These human-language experiments serve solely to validate our reference-free metric under data scarcity. It is found to correlate highly with a standard evaluation based on reference translations, which are available in our experiments. We also perform a theoretical analysis suggesting that interaction may not be necessary nor efficient in the early stages of learning to translate.
Automated Snippet-Alignment Data Augmentation for Code Translation
Zhang, Zhiming, Zhu, Qingfu, Luo, Xianzhen, Wang, Yixuan, Li, Bohan, Che, Wanxiang
Code translation aims to translate the code from its source language to the target language and is used in various software development scenarios. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their capabilities in code translation, and parallel corpora play a crucial role in training models for code translation. Parallel corpora can be categorized into program-alignment (PA) and snippet-alignment (SA) data. Although PA data has complete context and is suitable for semantic alignment learning, it may not provide adequate fine-grained training signals due to its extended length, while the brevity of SA data enables more fine-grained alignment learning. Due to limited parallel corpora, researchers explore several augmentation methods for code translation. Previous studies mainly focus on augmenting PA data. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method that leverages LLMs to generate SA data automatically. To fully leverage both PA data and SA data, we explore a simple yet effective two-stage training strategy, which consistently enhances model performance compared to fine-tuning solely on PA data. Experiments on TransCoder-test demonstrate that our augmented SA data combined with the two-stage training approach yields consistent improvements over the baseline, achieving a maximum gain of 3.78% on pass@k.
EDIT: Enhancing Vision Transformers by Mitigating Attention Sink through an Encoder-Decoder Architecture
Feng, Wenfeng, Wang, Hongxiang, Wang, Jianlong, Zhang, Xin, Zhao, Jingjing, Liang, Yueyue, Chen, Xiang, Han, Duokui
Abstract: In this paper, we propose EDIT (Encoder - Decoder Image Transformer), a novel architecture designed to mitigate the attention sink phenomenon observed in Vision Transformer (ViT) models. Attention sink occurs when an excessive amount of attention is allocated to the [CLS] token, distorting the model's ability to effectively process image patches. To address this, we introduce a layer - aligned encoder - decoder architecture, where the encoder utilizes self - attention to process image patches, while the decoder uses crossattention to focus on the [CLS] token. Unlike traditional encoder - decoder framework, where the decoder depends solely on high - level encoder representations, EDIT allows the decoder to extract information starting from low - level features, progressively refining the representation layer by layer. EDIT is naturally interpretable demonstrated through sequential attention . I ntroduction Transformer, introduced by Vaswani et al. [1], utilize self - attention and cross - attention mechanisms to extract intrinsic features from text data. Transformer includes both an encoder and a decoder, with the encoder extracting relevant information from input data and the decoder generating outputs based on this representation. Transformer and its improvements have achieved significant success in natural language processing (NLP) tasks [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Semantic Prosody in Machine Translation: the English-Chinese Case of Passive Structures
Ma, Xinyue, Pastells, Pol, Farrรบs, Mireia, Taulรฉ, Mariona
Semantic prosody is a collocational meaning formed through the co-occurrence of a linguistic unit and a consistent series of collocates, which should be treated separately from semantic meaning. Since words that are literal translations of each other may have different semantic prosody, more attention should be paid to this linguistic property to generate accurate translations. However, current machine translation models cannot handle this problem. To bridge the gap, we propose an approach to teach machine translation models about semantic prosody of a specific structure. We focus on Chinese BEI passives and create a dataset of English-Chinese sentence pairs with the purpose of demonstrating the negative semantic prosody of BEI passives. Then we fine-tune OPUS-MT, NLLB-600M and mBART50 models with our dataset for the English-Chinese translation task. Our results show that fine-tuned MT models perform better on using BEI passives for translating unfavourable content and avoid using it for neutral and favourable content. Also, in NLLB-600M, which is a multilingual model, this knowledge of semantic prosody can be transferred from English-Chinese translation to other language pairs, such as Spanish-Chinese.
From Binary to Bilingual: How the National Weather Service is Using Artificial Intelligence to Develop a Comprehensive Translation Program
Trujillo-Falcon, Joseph E., Bozeman, Monica L., Llewellyn, Liam E., Halvorson, Samuel T., Mizell, Meryl, Deshpande, Stuti, Manning, Bob, Fagin, Todd
To advance a Weather-Ready Nation, the National Weather Service (NWS) is developing a systematic translation program to better serve the 68.8 million people in the U.S. who do not speak English at home. This article outlines the foundation of an automated translation tool for NWS products, powered by artificial intelligence. The NWS has partnered with LILT, whose patented training process enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt neural machine translation (NMT) tools for weather terminology and messaging. Designed for scalability across Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) and National Centers, the system is currently being developed in Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, and other widely spoken non-English languages. Rooted in best practices for multilingual risk communication, the system provides accurate, timely, and culturally relevant translations, significantly reducing manual translation time and easing operational workloads across the NWS. To guide the distribution of these products, GIS mapping was used to identify language needs across different NWS regions, helping prioritize resources for the communities that need them most. We also integrated ethical AI practices throughout the program's design, ensuring that transparency, fairness, and human oversight guide how automated translations are created, evaluated, and shared with the public. This work has culminated into a website featuring experimental multilingual NWS products, including translated warnings, 7-day forecasts, and educational campaigns, bringing the country one step closer to a national warning system that reaches all Americans.
From Explainability to Action: A Generative Operational Framework for Integrating XAI in Clinical Mental Health Screening
Kandala, Ratna, Moharir, Akshata Kishore, Nayak, Divya Arvinda
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has been presented as the critical component for unlocking the potential of machine learning in mental health screening (MHS). However, a persistent lab-to-clinic gap remains. Current XAI techniques, such as SHAP and LIME, excel at producing technically faithful outputs such as feature importance scores, but fail to deliver clinically relevant, actionable insights that can be used by clinicians or understood by patients. This disconnect between technical transparency and human utility is the primary barrier to real-world adoption. This paper argues that this gap is a translation problem and proposes the Generative Operational Framework, a novel system architecture that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as a central translation engine. This framework is designed to ingest the raw, technical outputs from diverse XAI tools and synthesize them with clinical guidelines (via RAG) to automatically generate human-readable, evidence-backed clinical narratives. To justify our solution, we provide a systematic analysis of the components it integrates, tracing the evolution from intrinsic models to generative XAI. We demonstrate how this framework directly addresses key operational barriers, including workflow integration, bias mitigation, and stakeholder-specific communication. This paper also provides a strategic roadmap for moving the field beyond the generation of isolated data points toward the delivery of integrated, actionable, and trustworthy AI in clinical practice.
Beyond Single-Reward: Multi-Pair, Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization for Machine Translation
Wang, Hao, Xu, Linlong, Liu, Heng, Liu, Yangyang, Zhao, Xiaohu, Zeng, Bo, Shao, Liangying, Wang, Longyue, Luo, Weihua, Zhang, Kaifu
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a powerful paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences in Machine Translation (MT), but current methods are hindered by two fundamental challenges: (1) flawed reward signals from Quality Estimation (QE) models that overlook critical errors like translation hallucination, and (2) inefficient data utilization that discards valuable learning signals by selecting only a single win-loss pair. To address these limitations, we introduce M^2PO: Multi-Pair, Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization. Our framework integrates a multi-perspective reward engine that creates a more robust signal by combining two key viewpoints: a new hallucination penalty for factuality, and an innovative dynamic quality score that adaptively fuses external evaluations with the model's own evolving judgment. This is synergistically paired with a multi-pair construction strategy that systematically creates a comprehensive set of preference pairs from the entire pool of translation candidates. This synergistic approach ensures the model learns from a richer spectrum of quality trade-offs, leading to more robust and faithful translations. On challenging WMT21-22 benchmarks, M^2PO substantially outperforms existing preference optimization methods and demonstrates highly competitive performance against leading proprietary LLMs.
A fully automated and scalable Parallel Data Augmentation for Low Resource Languages using Image and Text Analytics
Sharma, Prawaal, Goyal, Navneet, Goyal, Poonam, R, Vishnupriyan
Linguistic diversity across the world creates a disparity with the availability of good quality digital language resources thereby restricting the technological benefits to majority of human population. The lack or absence of data resources makes it difficult to perform NLP tasks for low-resource languages. This paper presents a novel scalable and fully automated methodology to extract bilingual parallel corpora from newspaper articles using image and text analytics. We validate our approach by building parallel data corpus for two different language combinations and demonstrate the value of this dataset through a downstream task of machine translation and improve over the current baseline by close to 3 BLEU points.
StressTransfer: Stress-Aware Speech-to-Speech Translation with Emphasis Preservation
Chen, Xi, Song, Yuchen, Nakamura, Satoshi
EmphST -Bench To guide algorithm exploration and evaluate the performance of our model, we design an evaluation pipeline for the emphasis-preserving speech-to-speech translation system. Given the lack of ready-to-use benchmarks for this important task, we leverage LLMs to translate the test set from the StressTest [21] corpus into the target language and then filter the results via human experts. This process creates a high-quality benchmark dataset, EmphST -Bench, with manually verified emphasis alignments between source and target utterances, ensuring reliable assessment of cross-lingual emphasis preservation. The human filtering step focuses on correcting any discrepancies in semantic equivalence, contrastive focus, and emotional intensity, resulting in a robust evaluation set that closely mirrors real-world linguistic nuances. EmphST -Bench consists of carefully selected parallel samples from English (source) to Chinese (target), providing a standardized resource for evaluating stress-aware S2ST systems. We report the statistics of EmphST -Bench in Table. 1. T able 1: Statistics of the EmphST -Bench dataset.Statistic V alue Number of Samples 218 Avg.