@inproceedings{gurav-etal-2026-domain,
    title = "Domain-Specific Quality Estimation for Machine Translation in Low-Resource Scenarios",
    author = "Gurav, Namrata Bhalchandra Patil  and
      Ranu, Akashdeep  and
      Sindhujan, Archchana  and
      Kanojia, Diptesh",
    editor = "Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Plum, Alistair  and
      Rayson, Paul  and
      Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Gaber, Mohamed  and
      Premasiri, Damith  and
      Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Uyangodage, Lasitha",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages ({L}o{R}es{LM} 2026)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.loreslm-1.55/",
    pages = "630--650",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-377-7",
    abstract = "Quality Estimation (QE) is essential for assessing machine translation quality in reference-less settings, particularly for domain-specific and low-resource language scenarios. In this paper, we investigate sentence-level QE for English to Indic machine translation across four domains (Healthcare, Legal, Tourism, and General) and five language pairs. We systematically compare zero-shot, few-shot, and guideline-anchored prompting across selected closed-weight and open-weight LLMs. Findings indicate that while closed-weight models achieve strong performance via prompting alone, prompt-only approaches remain fragile for open-weight models, especially in high-risk domains. To address this, we adopt ALOPE, a framework for LLM-based QE which uses Low-Rank Adaptation with regression heads attached to selected intermediate Transformer layers. We also extend ALOPE with the recently proposed Low-Rank Multiplicative Adaptation (LoRMA) for this work. Our results show that intermediate-layer adaptation consistently improves QE performance, with gains in semantically complex domains, indicating a way ahead for robust QE in practical scenarios. We release code and domain-specific QE datasets publicly for further research."
}