Giving the Old a Fresh Spin: Quality Estimation-Assisted Constrained Decoding for Automatic Post-Editing

Sourabh Deoghare, Diptesh Kanojia, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Automatic Post-Editing (APE) systems often struggle with over-correction, where unnecessary modifications are made to a translation, diverging from the principle of minimal editing. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to mitigate over-correction by incorporating word-level Quality Estimation (QE) information during the decoding process. This method is architecture-agnostic, making it adaptable to any APE system, regardless of the underlying model or training approach. Our experiments on English-German, English-Hindi, and English-Marathi language pairs show the proposed approach yields significant improvements over their corresponding baseline APE systems, with TER gains of 0.65, 1.86, and 1.44 points, respectively. These results underscore the complementary relationship between QE and APE tasks and highlight the effectiveness of integrating QE information to reduce over-correction in APE systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-short.77
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
914–925
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-short.77/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sourabh Deoghare, Diptesh Kanojia, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2025. Giving the Old a Fresh Spin: Quality Estimation-Assisted Constrained Decoding for Automatic Post-Editing. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 914–925, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Giving the Old a Fresh Spin: Quality Estimation-Assisted Constrained Decoding for Automatic Post-Editing (Deoghare et al., NAACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-short.77.pdf