SemEval-2025 Task 2: Entity-Aware Machine Translation

Simone Conia, Min Li, Roberto Navigli, Saloni Potdar


Abstract
Translating text that contains complex or challenging named entities—e.g., cultural-specific book and movie titles, location names, proper nouns, food names, etc.—remains a difficult task for modern machine translation systems, including the latest large language models. To systematically study and advance progress in this area, we organized Entity-Aware Machine Translation, or EA-MT, a shared task that evaluates how well systems handle entity translation across 10 language pairs. With EA-MT, we introduce XC-Translate, a novel gold benchmark comprising over 50K manually-translated sentences with entity names that can deviate significantly from word-to-word translations in their target languages. This paper describes the creation process of XC-Translate, provides an overview of the approaches explored by our participants, presents the main evaluation findings, and points toward open research directions, such as contextual retrieval methods for low-resource entities and more robust evaluation metrics for entity correctness. We hope that our shared task will inspire further research in entity-aware machine translation and foster the development of more culturally-accurate translation systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.326
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2535–2557
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.326/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simone Conia, Min Li, Roberto Navigli, and Saloni Potdar. 2025. SemEval-2025 Task 2: Entity-Aware Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 2535–2557, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SemEval-2025 Task 2: Entity-Aware Machine Translation (Conia et al., SemEval 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.326.pdf