ITALERT: Assessing the Quality of LLMs and NMT in Translating Italian Emergency Response Text

Maria Carmen Staiano, Lifeng Han, Johanna Monti, Francesca Chiusaroli


Abstract
This paper presents the outcomes of an initial investigation into the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems in translating high-stakes messages. The research employed a novel bilingual corpus, ITALERT (Italian Emergency Response Text) and applied a human-centric post-editing based metric (HOPE) to assess translation quality systematically. The initial dataset contains eleven texts in Italian and their corresponding English translations, both extracted from the national communication campaign website of the Italian Civil Protection Department. The texts deal with eight crisis scenarios: flooding, earthquake, forest fire, volcanic eruption, tsunami, industrial accident, nuclear risk, and dam failure. The dataset has been carefully compiled to ensure usability and clarity for evaluating machine translation (MT) systems in crisis settings. Our findings show that current LLMs and NMT models, such as ChatGPT (OpenAI’s GPT-4o model) and Google MT, face limitations in translating emergency texts, particularly in maintaining the appropriate register, resolving context ambiguities, and managing domain-specific terminology.
Anthology ID:
2025.mtsummit-1.43
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1
Month:
June
Year:
2025
Address:
Geneva, Switzerland
Editors:
Pierrette Bouillon, Johanna Gerlach, Sabrina Girletti, Lise Volkart, Raphael Rubino, Rico Sennrich, Ana C. Farinha, Marco Gaido, Joke Daems, Dorothy Kenny, Helena Moniz, Sara Szoc
Venue:
MTSummit
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
566–577
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-1.43/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maria Carmen Staiano, Lifeng Han, Johanna Monti, and Francesca Chiusaroli. 2025. ITALERT: Assessing the Quality of LLMs and NMT in Translating Italian Emergency Response Text. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1, pages 566–577, Geneva, Switzerland. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
ITALERT: Assessing the Quality of LLMs and NMT in Translating Italian Emergency Response Text (Staiano et al., MTSummit 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-1.43.pdf