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 Machine Translation


SUMART: SUMmARizing Translation from Wordy to Concise Expression

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose SUMART, a method for summarizing and compressing the volume of verbose subtitle translations. SUMART is designed for understanding translated captions (e.g., interlingual conversations via subtitle translation or when watching movies in foreign language audio and translated captions). SUMART is intended for users who want a big-picture and fast understanding of the conversation, audio, video content, and speech in a foreign language. During the training data collection, when a speaker makes a verbose statement, SUMART employs a large language model on-site to compress the volume of subtitles. This compressed data is then stored in a database for fine-tuning purposes. Later, SUMART uses data pairs from those non-compressed ASR results and compressed translated results for fine-tuning the translation model to generate more concise translations for practical uses. In practical applications, SUMART utilizes this trained model to produce concise translation results. Furthermore, as a practical application, we developed an application that allows conversations using subtitle translation in augmented reality spaces. As a pilot study, we conducted qualitative surveys using a SUMART prototype and a survey on the summarization model for SUMART. We envision the most effective use case of this system is where users need to consume a lot of information quickly (e.g., Speech, lectures, podcasts, Q&A in conferences).


Myanmar XNLI: Building a Dataset and Exploring Low-resource Approaches to Natural Language Inference with Myanmar

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite dramatic recent progress in NLP, it is still a major challenge to apply Large Language Models (LLM) to low-resource languages. This is made visible in benchmarks such as Cross-Lingual Natural Language Inference (XNLI), a key task that demonstrates cross-lingual capabilities of NLP systems across a set of 15 languages. In this paper, we extend the XNLI task for one additional low-resource language, Myanmar, as a proxy challenge for broader low-resource languages, and make three core contributions. First, we build a dataset called Myanmar XNLI (myXNLI) using community crowd-sourced methods, as an extension to the existing XNLI corpus. This involves a two-stage process of community-based construction followed by expert verification; through an analysis, we demonstrate and quantify the value of the expert verification stage in the context of community-based construction for low-resource languages. We make the myXNLI dataset available to the community for future research. Second, we carry out evaluations of recent multilingual language models on the myXNLI benchmark, as well as explore data-augmentation methods to improve model performance. Our data-augmentation methods improve model accuracy by up to 2 percentage points for Myanmar, while uplifting other languages at the same time. Third, we investigate how well these data-augmentation methods generalise to other low-resource languages in the XNLI dataset.


Enhancing Contrastive Demonstration Selection with Semantic Diversity for Robust In-Context Machine Translation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers large language models to perform tasks by conditioning on a few input-output examples. However, the performance of ICL is highly sensitive to the selection of these demonstrations. While existing methods focus on similarity or contrastive selection, they often overlook the importance of diversity among the chosen examples. In this paper, we propose DiverseConE (Diversity-Enhanced Contrastive Example Selection), a novel approach for demonstration selection in in-context learning for machine translation. Our method builds upon contrastive selection by incorporating a diversity enhancement step based on embedding space dissimilarity. We conduct extensive experiments on the Llama2-7b model across four language pairs (English-Chinese, Chinese-English, Russian-German, German-Russian) in 1-shot and 3-shot settings, using COMET20 and COMET22 for evaluation. Our results demonstrate that DiverseConE consistently outperforms strong baseline methods, including random selection, BM25, TopK, and a state-of-the-art contrastive selection method. Further analysis, including diversity metrics and human evaluation, validates the effectiveness of our approach and highlights the benefits of considering demonstration diversity for improved translation quality.


Redefining Machine Translation on Social Network Services with Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The globalization of social interactions has heightened the need for machine translation (MT) on Social Network Services (SNS), yet traditional models struggle with culturally nuanced content like memes, slang, and pop culture references. While large language models (LLMs) have advanced general-purpose translation, their performance on SNS-specific content remains limited due to insufficient specialized training data and evaluation benchmarks. This paper introduces RedTrans, a 72B LLM tailored for SNS translation, trained on a novel dataset developed through three innovations: (1) Supervised Finetuning with Dual-LLM Back-Translation Sampling, an unsupervised sampling method using LLM-based back-translation to select diverse data for large-scale finetuning; (2) Rewritten Preference Optimization (RePO), an algorithm that identifies and corrects erroneous preference pairs through expert annotation, building reliable preference corpora; and (3) RedTrans-Bench, the first benchmark for SNS translation, evaluating phenomena like humor localization, emoji semantics, and meme adaptation. Experiments show RedTrans outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs. Besides, RedTrans has already been deployed in a real-world production environment, demonstrating that domain-specific adaptation, effectively bridges the gap between generic and culturally grounded translation systems.


Context-Aware Monolingual Human Evaluation of Machine Translation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper explores the potential of context-aware monolingual human evaluation for assessing machine translation (MT) when no source is given for reference. To this end, we compare monolingual with bilingual evaluations (with source text), under two scenarios: the evaluation of a single MT system, and the comparative evaluation of pairwise MT systems. Four professional translators performed both monolingual and bilingual evaluations by assigning ratings and annotating errors, and providing feedback on their experience. Our findings suggest that context-aware monolingual human evaluation achieves comparable outcomes to human bilingual evaluations, and suggest the feasibility and potential of monolingual evaluation as an efficient approach to assessing MT.


High-Resource Translation:Turning Abundance into Accessibility

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

High-Resource Translation: Turning Abundance into Accessibility Y anampally Abhiram Reddy ABV -IIITM Gwalior, MP, India Abstract --This paper presents a novel approach to constructing an English-to-T elugu translation model by leveraging transfer learning techniques and addressing the challenges associated with low-resource languages. Utilizing the Bharat Parallel Corpus Collection (BPCC) as the primary dataset, the model incorporates iterative backtranslation to generate synthetic parallel data, effectively augmenting the training dataset and enhancing the model's translation capabilities. The focus of this research extends beyond mere translation accuracy; it encompasses a comprehensive strategy for improving model performance through data augmentation, optimization of training parameters, and the effective utilization of pre-trained models. By adopting these methodologies, we aim to create a more robust translation system that can handle a diverse range of sentence structures and linguistic nuances inherent to both English and T elugu. This research highlights the significance of innovative data handling techniques and the potential of transfer learning in overcoming the limitations posed by sparse datasets in low-resource languages.This research not only contributes to the field of machine translation but also aims to facilitate better communication and understanding between English and T elugu speakers in real-world contexts. Future work will concentrate on further enhancing the models robustness and expanding its applicability to more complex sentence structures, ultimately ensuring its practical usability across various domains and applications. I NTRODUCTION Machine translation (MT) is a significant subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on automatically translating text from one language to another.


You Cannot Feed Two Birds with One Score: the Accuracy-Naturalness Tradeoff in Translation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The goal of translation, be it by human or by machine, is, given some text in a source language, to produce text in a target language that simultaneously 1) preserves the meaning of the source text and 2) achieves natural expression in the target language. However, researchers in the machine translation community usually assess translations using a single score intended to capture semantic accuracy and the naturalness of the output simultaneously. In this paper, we build on recent advances in information theory to mathematically prove and empirically demonstrate that such single-score summaries do not and cannot give the complete picture of a system's true performance. Concretely, we prove that a tradeoff exists between accuracy and naturalness and demonstrate it by evaluating the submissions to the WMT24 shared task. Our findings help explain well-known empirical phenomena, such as the observation that optimizing translation systems for a specific accuracy metric (like BLEU) initially improves the system's naturalness, while ``overfitting'' the system to the metric can significantly degrade its naturalness. Thus, we advocate for a change in how translations are evaluated: rather than comparing systems using a single number, they should be compared on an accuracy-naturalness plane.


CrackSQL: A Hybrid SQL Dialect Translation System Powered by Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Dialect translation plays a key role in enabling seamless interaction across heterogeneous database systems. However, translating SQL queries between different dialects (e.g., from PostgreSQL to MySQL) remains a challenging task due to syntactic discrepancies and subtle semantic variations. Existing approaches including manual rewriting, rule-based systems, and large language model (LLM)-based techniques often involve high maintenance effort (e.g., crafting custom translation rules) or produce unreliable results (e.g., LLM generates non-existent functions), especially when handling complex queries. In this demonstration, we present CrackSQL, the first hybrid SQL dialect translation system that combines rule and LLM-based methods to overcome these limitations. CrackSQL leverages the adaptability of LLMs to minimize manual intervention, while enhancing translation accuracy by segmenting lengthy complex SQL via functionality-based query processing. To further improve robustness, it incorporates a novel cross-dialect syntax embedding model for precise syntax alignment, as well as an adaptive local-to-global translation strategy that effectively resolves interdependent query operations. CrackSQL supports three translation modes and offers multiple deployment and access options including a web console interface, a PyPI package, and a command-line prompt, facilitating adoption across a variety of real-world use cases


An evaluation of LLMs and Google Translate for translation of selected Indian languages via sentiment and semantic analyses

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language models (LLMs) have been prominent for language translation, including low-resource languages. There has been limited study about the assessment of the quality of translations generated by LLMs, including Gemini, GPT and Google Translate. In this study, we address this limitation by using semantic and sentiment analysis of selected LLMs for Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Telugu and Hindi. We select prominent texts that have been well translated by experts and use LLMs to generate their translations to English, and then we provide a comparison with selected expert (human) translations. Our findings suggest that while LLMs have made significant progress in translation accuracy, challenges remain in preserving sentiment and semantic integrity, especially in figurative and philosophical contexts. The sentiment analysis revealed that GPT-4o and GPT-3.5 are better at preserving the sentiments for the Bhagavad Gita (Sanskrit-English) translations when compared to Google Translate. We observed a similar trend for the case of Tamas (Hindi-English) and Maha P (Telugu-English) translations. GPT-4o performs similarly to GPT-3.5 in the translation in terms of sentiments for the three languages. We found that LLMs are generally better at translation for capturing sentiments when compared to Google Translate.


Boundless Byte Pair Encoding: Breaking the Pre-tokenization Barrier

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Pre-tokenization, the initial step in many modern tokenization pipelines, segments text into smaller units called pretokens, typically splitting on whitespace and punctuation. While this process encourages having full, individual words as tokens, it introduces a fundamental limitation in most tokenization algorithms such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE). Specifically, pre-tokenization causes the distribution of tokens in a corpus to heavily skew towards common, full-length words. This skewed distribution limits the benefits of expanding to larger vocabularies, since the additional tokens appear with progressively lower counts. To overcome this barrier, we propose BoundlessBPE, a modified BPE algorithm that relaxes the pretoken boundary constraint. Our approach selectively merges two complete pretokens into a larger unit we term a superword. Superwords are not necessarily semantically cohesive. For example, the pretokens " of" and " the" might be combined to form the superword " of the". This merging strategy results in a substantially more uniform distribution of tokens across a corpus than standard BPE, and compresses text more effectively, with an approximate 20% increase in bytes per token.