The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models presents both opportunities and challenges for the translation field. While commercial, cloud-based AI chatbots have garnered significant attention in translation studies, concerns regarding data privacy, security, and equitable access necessitate exploration of alternative deployment models. This paper investigates the feasibility and performance of locally deployable, free language models as a viable alternative to proprietary, cloud-based AI solutions. This study evaluates three open-source models installed on CPU-based platforms and compared against commercially available online chat-bots. The evaluation focuses on functional performance rather than a comparative analysis of human-machine translation quality, an area already subject to extensive research. The platforms assessed were chosen for their accessibility and ease of use across various operating systems. While local deployment introduces its own challenges, the benefits of enhanced data control, improved privacy, and reduced dependency on cloud services are compelling. The findings of this study contribute to a growing body of knowledge concerning the democratization of AI technology and inform future research and development efforts aimed at making LLMs more accessible and practical for a wider range of users, specifically focusing on the needs of individual translators and small businesses.

We present an automated evaluation system for assessing COBOL-to-Java code translation within IBM's watsonx Code Assistant for Z (WCA4Z). The system addresses key challenges in evaluating LLM-based translators, including model opacity and the complexity of translation quality assessment. Our approach combines analytic checkers with LLM-as-a-judge (LaaJ) techniques to deliver scalable, multi-faceted evaluations. The system supports continuous integration workflows, enables large-scale benchmarking, and reduces reliance on manual review. We describe the system architecture, evaluation strategies, and reporting mechanisms that provide actionable insights for developers and project managers, facilitating the evolution of high-quality, modernized codebases.

This paper explores sequence-level knowledge distillation (KD) of multilingual pre-trained encoder-decoder translation models. We argue that the teacher model's output distribution holds valuable insights for the student, beyond the approximated mode obtained through beam search (the standard decoding method), and present Multi-Hypothesis Distillation (MHD), a sequence-level KD method that generates multiple translations for each source sentence. This provides a larger representation of the teacher model distribution and exposes the student model to a wider range of target-side prefixes. We leverage $n$-best lists from beam search to guide the student's learning and examine alternative decoding methods to address issues like low variability and the under-representation of infrequent tokens. For low-resource languages, our research shows that while sampling methods may slightly compromise translation quality compared to beam search based approaches, they enhance the generated corpora with greater variability and lexical richness. This ultimately improves student model performance and mitigates the gender bias amplification often associated with KD.

Understanding and modeling buyer intent is a foundational challenge in optimizing search query reformulation within the dynamic landscape of e-commerce search systems. This work introduces a robust data pipeline designed to mine and analyze large-scale buyer query logs, with a focus on extracting fine-grained intent signals from both explicit interactions and implicit behavioral cues. Leveraging advanced sequence mining techniques and supervised learning models, the pipeline systematically captures patterns indicative of latent purchase intent, enabling the construction of a high-fidelity, intent-rich dataset. The proposed framework facilitates the development of adaptive query rewrite strategies by grounding reformulations in inferred user intent rather than surface-level lexical signals. This alignment between query rewriting and underlying user objectives enhances both retrieval relevance and downstream engagement metrics. Empirical evaluations across multiple product verticals demonstrate measurable gains in precision-oriented relevance metrics, underscoring the efficacy of intent-aware reformulation. Our findings highlight the value of intent-centric modeling in bridging the gap between sparse user inputs and complex product discovery goals, and establish a scalable foundation for future research in user-aligned neural retrieval and ranking systems.

Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing (NLP) and other sequence modeling domains, where the choice of vocabulary size significantly impacts model performance. Despite its importance, selecting an optimal vocabulary size remains underexplored, typically relying on heuristics or dataset-specific choices. In this work, we propose a principled method for determining the vocabulary size by analyzing token frequency distributions through Zipf's law. We show that downstream task performance correlates with how closely token distributions follow power-law behavior, and that aligning with Zipfian scaling improves both model efficiency and effectiveness. Extensive experiments across NLP, genomics, and chemistry demonstrate that models consistently achieve peak performance when the token distribution closely adheres to Zipf's law, establishing Zipfian alignment as a robust and generalizable criterion for vocabulary size selection.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.