Rei Endo


2025

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NHK Submission to WAT 2025: Leveraging Preference Optimization for Article-level Japanese–English News Translation
Hideya Mino | Rei Endo | Yoshihiko Kawai
Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2025)

This paper describes our submission to the Japanese English Article-level News Translation Task at WAT 2025. In this task, participants were provided with a small but high-quality parallel corpus along with two intermediate English translations: a literal translation and a style-adapted translation. To effectively exploit these limited training data, our system employs a large language model (LLM) trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that is a preference learning technique for aligning model outputs with professional-quality references. By leveraging literal and style-adapted intermediate translations as negative (rejected) samples and human-edited English articles as positive (chosen) samples in DPO training, we achieved notable improvements in translation quality. We evaluate our approach using BLEU scores and human assessments.