Structured Document Translation via Format Reinforcement Learning
Haiyue Song, Johannes Eschbach-Dymanus, Hour Kaing, Sumire Honda, Hideki Tanaka, Bianka Buschbeck, Masao Utiyama
Abstract
Recent works on structured text translation remain limited to the sentence level, as they struggle to effectively handle the complex document-level XML or HTML structures. To address this, we propose Format Reinforcement Learning (FormatRL), which employs Group Relative Policy Optimization on top of a supervised fine-tuning model to directly optimize novel structure-aware rewards: 1) TreeSim, which measures structural similarity between predicted and reference XML trees and 2) Node-chrF, which measures translation quality at the level of XML nodes. Additionally, we propose StrucAUC, a fine-grained metric distinguishing between minor errors and major structural failures. Experiments on the SAP software-documentation benchmark demonstrate improvements across six metrics and an analysis further shows how different reward functions contribute to improvements in both structural and translation quality.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.ijcnlp-long.38
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Mumbai, India
- Editors:
- Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
- Venues:
- IJCNLP | AACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 677–697
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.38/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Haiyue Song, Johannes Eschbach-Dymanus, Hour Kaing, Sumire Honda, Hideki Tanaka, Bianka Buschbeck, and Masao Utiyama. 2025. Structured Document Translation via Format Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 677–697, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Structured Document Translation via Format Reinforcement Learning (Song et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.38.pdf