In this study, we explore the effectiveness of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Llama 3 8B Instruct, using translation memories (TMs) for hyper-specific machine translation (MT) tasks. Decoder-only LLMs have shown impressive performance in MT due to their ability to learn from extensive datasets and generate high quality translations. However, LLMs often struggle with the nuances and style required for organisation-specific translation so we leverage TMs, which store human translated segments, as a valuable resource to enhance translation accuracy and efficiency. We investigate the impact of fine-tuning the Llama 3 model using TMs from a specific organisation in the software sector. Our experiments cover five translation directions across languages of varying resource levels (English to Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, German, Finnish, and Korean). We analyse diverse sizes of training datasets (1k to 100k+ segments) to evaluate their influence on translation quality. We fine-tune separate models for each training set and evaluate their performance based on automatic metrics, BLEU, chrF++, TER, and COMET. Our findings reveal improvement in translation performance with larger datasets across all metrics. On average, BLEU and COMET scores increase by 13 and 25 points respectively on the largest training set against the baseline model. Notably, there is a performance deterioration in comparison with the baseline model when fine-tuning on only 1k and 2k examples; however, we observe a substantial improvement as the training dataset size increases. The study highlights the potential of integrating TMs with LLMs to create bespoke translation models tailored to the specific needs of businesses, therefore enhancing translation quality and reducing turn-around times. This approach offers a valuable insight for organisations seeking to leverage TMs and LLMs for optimal translation outcomes, specially in narrower domains.

This paper reports the preliminary resultsof a survey aimed at identifying and ex-ploring the attitudes and recommendationsof machine translation quality assessment(MTQA) educators. Drawing upon ele-ments from the literature on MTQA teach-ing, the survey explores themes that maypose a challenge or lead to successful im-plementation of human evaluation, as theliterature shows that there has not beenenough design and reporting. Results show educators’ awareness ofthe topic, awareness stemming from therecommendations of the literature on MTevaluation, and reports new challenges andissues.

This paper presents the results of the WMT23 Metrics Shared Task. Participants submitting automatic MT evaluation metrics were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT23 News Translation Task. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate with human ratings at the system and segment level. Similar to last year, we acquired our own human ratings based on expert-based human evaluation via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). Following last year’s success, we also included a challenge set subtask, where participants had to create contrastive test suites for evaluating metrics’ ability to capture and penalise specific types of translation errors. Furthermore, we improved our meta-evaluation procedure by considering fewer tasks and calculating a global score by weighted averaging across the various tasks. We present an extensive analysis on how well metrics perform on three language pairs: Chinese-English, Hebrew-English on the sentence-level and English-German on the paragraph-level. The results strongly confirm the results reported last year, that neural-based metrics are significantly better than non-neural metrics in their levels of correlation with human judgments. Further, we investigate the impact of bad reference translations on the correlations of metrics with human judgment. We present a novel approach for generating synthetic reference translations based on the collection of MT system outputs and their corresponding MQM ratings, which has the potential to mitigate bad reference issues we observed this year for some language pairs. Finally, we also study the connections between the magnitude of metric differences and their expected significance in human evaluation, which should help the community to better understand and adopt new metrics.

This paper addresses the challenges of evaluating document-level machine translation (MT) in the context of recent advances in context-aware neural machine translation (NMT). It investigates how well online MT systems deal with six context-related issues, namely lexical ambiguity, grammatical gender, grammatical number, reference, ellipsis, and terminology, when a larger context span containing the solution for those issues is given as input. Results are compared to the translation outputs from the online ChatGPT. Our results show that, while the change of punctuation in the input yields great variability in the output translations, the context position does not seem to have a great impact. Moreover, the GPT model seems to outperform the NMT systems but performs poorly for Irish. The study aims to provide insights into the effectiveness of online MT systems in handling context and highlight the importance of considering contextual factors in evaluating MT systems.

This paper analyses how much context span is necessary to solve different context-related issues, namely, reference, ellipsis, gender, number, lexical ambiguity, and terminology when translating from English into Portuguese. We use the DELA corpus, which consists of 60 documents and six different domains (subtitles, literary, news, reviews, medical, and legislation). We find that the shortest context span to disambiguate issues can appear in different positions in the document including preceding, following, global, world knowledge. Moreover, the average length depends on the issue types as well as the domain. Moreover, we show that the standard approach of relying on only two preceding sentences as context might not be enough depending on the domain and issue types.

Sarcasm is extensively used in User Generated Content (UGC) in order to express one’s discontent, especially through blogs, forums, or social media such as Twitter. Several works have attempted to detect and analyse sarcasm in UGC. However, the lack of freely available corpora in this field makes the task even more difficult. In this work, we present “TransCasm” corpus, a parallel corpus of sarcastic tweets translated from English into French along with their non-sarcastic representations. To build the bilingual corpus of sarcasm, we select the “SIGN” corpus, a monolingual data set of sarcastic tweets and their non-sarcastic interpretations, created by (Peled and Reichart, 2017). We propose to define linguistic guidelines for developing “TransCasm” which is the first ever bilingual corpus of sarcastic tweets. In addition, we utilise “TransCasm” for building a binary sarcasm classifier in order to identify whether a tweet is sarcastic or not. Our experiment reveals that the sarcasm classifier achieves 61% accuracy on detecting sarcasm in tweets. “TransCasm” is now freely available online and is ready to be explored for further research.

In this paper we describe our reproduction study of the human evaluation of text simplic- ity reported by Nisioi et al. (2017). The work was carried out as part of the ReproGen Shared Task 2022 on Reproducibility of Evaluations in NLG. Our aim was to repeat the evaluation of simplicity for nine automatic text simplification systems with a different set of evaluators. We describe our experimental design together with the known aspects of the original experimental design and present the results from both studies. Pearson correlation between the original and reproduction scores is moderate to high (0.776). Inter-annotator agreement in the reproduction study is lower (0.40) than in the original study (0.66). We discuss challenges arising from the unavailability of certain aspects of the origi- nal set-up, and make several suggestions as to how reproduction of similar evaluations can be made easier in future.

This paper introduces the MT-Pese project, which aims at researching the post-editese phenomena in machine translated texts. We describe a range of experiments performed in order to gauge the effect of post-editese in dif-ferent domains, backtranslation, and quality.

This paper presents the results of the DELA Project. We describe the testing of context span for document-level evaluation, construction of a document-level corpus, and context position, as well as the latest developments of the project when looking at human and automatic evaluation metrics for document-level evaluation.

This paper provides an overview of the main achievements of the completed PRINCIPLE project, a 2-year action funded by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme. PRINCIPLE focused on collecting high-quality language resources for Croatian, Icelandic, Irish and Norwegian, which are severely low-resource languages, especially for building effective machine translation (MT) systems. We report the achievements of the project, primarily, in terms of the large amounts of data collected for all four low-resource languages and of promoting the uptake of neural MT (NMT) for these languages.

Document-level human evaluation of machine translation (MT) has been raising interest in the community. However, little is known about the issues of using document-level methodologies to assess MT quality. In this article, we compare the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) scores, the effort to assess the quality in different document-level methodologies, and the issue of misevaluation when sentences are evaluated out of context.

When developing Machine Translation engines, low resourced language pairs tend to be in a disadvantaged position: less available data means that developing robust MT models can be more challenging. The EU-funded PRINCIPLE project aims at overcoming this challenge for four low resourced European languages: Norwegian, Croatian, Irish and Icelandic. This presentation will give an overview of the project, with a focus on the set of Public Sector users and their use cases for which we have developed MT solutions. We will discuss the range of language resources that have been gathered through contributions from public sector collaborators, and present the extensive evaluations that have been undertaken, including significant user evaluation of MT systems across all of the public sector participants in each of the four countries involved.

Recently, the Machine Translation (MT) community has become more interested in document-level evaluation especially in light of reactions to claims of “human parity”, since examining the quality at the level of the document rather than at the sentence level allows for the assessment of suprasentential context, providing a more reliable evaluation. This paper presents a document-level corpus annotated in English with context-aware issues that arise when translating from English into Brazilian Portuguese, namely ellipsis, gender, lexical ambiguity, number, reference, and terminology, with six different domains. The corpus can be used as a challenge test set for evaluation and as a training/testing corpus for MT as well as for deep linguistic analysis of context issues. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus of its kind.

Despite increasing efforts to improve evaluation of machine translation (MT) by going beyond the sentence level to the document level, the definition of what exactly constitutes a “document level” is still not clear. This work deals with the context span necessary for a more reliable MT evaluation. We report results from a series of surveys involving three domains and 18 target languages designed to identify the necessary context span as well as issues related to it. Our findings indicate that, despite the fact that some issues and spans are strongly dependent on domain and on the target language, a number of common patterns can be observed so that general guidelines for context-aware MT evaluation can be drawn.

With official status in both Ireland and the EU, there is a need for high-quality English-Irish (EN-GA) machine translation (MT) systems which are suitable for use in a professional translation environment. While we have seen recent research on improving both statistical MT and neural MT for the EN-GA pair, the results of such systems have always been reported using automatic evaluation metrics. This paper provides the first human evaluation study of EN-GA MT using professional translators and in-domain (public administration) data for a more accurate depiction of the translation quality available via MT.

Document-level (doc-level) human eval-uation of machine translation (MT) has raised interest in the community after a fewattempts have disproved claims of “human parity” (Toral et al., 2018; Laubli et al.,2018). However, little is known about bestpractices regarding doc-level human evalu-ation. The goal of this project is to identifywhich methodologies better cope with i)the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) humanmetrics, ii) a possible complexity when as-signing a single score to a text consisted of‘good’ and ‘bad’ sentences, iii) a possibletiredness bias in doc-level set-ups, and iv)the difference in inter-annotator agreement(IAA) between sentence and doc-level set-ups.

Document-level evaluation of machine translation has raised interest in the community especially since responses to the claims of “human parity” (Toral et al., 2018; Läubli et al., 2018) with document-level human evaluations have been published. Yet, little is known about best practices regarding human evaluation of machine translation at the document-level. This paper presents a comparison of the differences in inter-annotator agreement between quality assessments using sentence and document-level set-ups. We report results of the agreement between professional translators for fluency and adequacy scales, error annotation, and pair-wise ranking, along with the effort needed to perform the different tasks. To best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind.

The translation of ambiguous words still poses challenges for machine translation. In this work, we carry out a systematic quantitative analysis regarding the ability of different machine translation systems to disambiguate the source language conjunctions “but” and “and”. We evaluate specialised test sets focused on the translation of these two conjunctions. The test sets contain source languages that do not distinguish different variants of the given conjunction, whereas the target languages do. In total, we evaluate the conjunction “but” on 20 translation outputs, and the conjunction “and” on 10. All machine translation systems almost perfectly recognise one variant of the target conjunction, especially for the source conjunction “but”. The other target variant, however, represents a challenge for machine translation systems, with accuracy varying from 50% to 95% for “but” and from 20% to 57% for “and”. The major error for all systems is replacing the correct target variant with the opposite one.

Most of the test sets used for the evaluation of MT systems reflect the frequency distribution of different phenomena found in naturally occurring data (”standard” or ”natural” test sets). However, to better understand particular strengths and weaknesses of MT systems, especially those based on neural networks, it is necessary to apply more focused evaluation procedures. Therefore, another type of test sets (”challenge” test sets, also called ”test suites”) is being increasingly employed in order to highlight points of difficulty which are relevant to model development, training, or using of the given system. This tutorial will be useful for anyone (researchers, developers, users, translators) interested in detailed evaluation and getting a better understanding of machine translation (MT) systems and models. The attendees will learn about the motivation and linguistic background of challenge test sets and a range of testing possibilities applied to the state-of-the-art MT systems, as well as a number of practical aspects and challenges.

While a number of studies have shown evidence of translationese phenomena, that is, statistical differences between original texts and translated texts (Gellerstam, 1986), results of studies searching for translationese features in postedited texts (what has been called ”posteditese” (Daems et al., 2017)) have presented mixed results. This paper reports a preliminary study aimed at identifying the presence of post-editese features in machine-translated post-edited texts and at understanding how they differ from translationese features. We test the influence of factors such as post-editing (PE) levels (full vs. light), translation proficiency (professionals vs. students) and text domain (news vs. literary). Results show evidence of post-editese features, especially in light PE texts and in certain domains.

We reassess a recent study (Hassan et al., 2018) that claimed that machine translation (MT) has reached human parity for the translation of news from Chinese into English, using pairwise ranking and considering three variables that were not taken into account in that previous study: the language in which the source side of the test set was originally written, the translation proficiency of the evaluators, and the provision of inter-sentential context. If we consider only original source text (i.e. not translated from another language, or translationese), then we find evidence showing that human parity has not been achieved. We compare the judgments of professional translators against those of non-experts and discover that those of the experts result in higher inter-annotator agreement and better discrimination between human and machine translations. In addition, we analyse the human translations of the test set and identify important translation issues. Finally, based on these findings, we provide a set of recommendations for future human evaluations of MT.

This paper reports on a pilot experiment that compares two different machine translation (MT) paradigms in reading comprehension tests. To explore a suitable methodology, we set up a pilot experiment with a group of six users (with English, Spanish and Simplified Chinese languages) using an English Language Testing System (IELTS), and an eye-tracker. The users were asked to read three texts in their native language: either the original English text (for the English speakers) or the machine-translated text (for the Spanish and Simplified Chinese speakers). The original texts were machine-translated via two MT systems: neural (NMT) and statistical (SMT). The users were also asked to rank satisfaction statements on a 3-point scale after reading each text and answering the respective comprehension questions. After all tasks were completed, a post-task retrospective interview took place to gather qualitative data. The findings suggest that the users from the target languages completed more tasks in less time with a higher level of satisfaction when using translations from the NMT system.

Given (i) the rise of a new paradigm to machine translation based on neural networks that results in more fluent and less literal output than previous models and (ii) the maturity of machine-assisted translation via post-editing in industry, project PiPeNovel studies the feasibility of the post-editing workflow for literary text conducting experiments with professional literary translators.

In this paper, we study how humans perceive the use of images as an additional knowledge source to machine-translate user-generated product listings in an e-commerce company. We conduct a human evaluation where we assess how a multi-modal neural machine translation (NMT) model compares to two text-only approaches: a conventional state-of-the-art attention-based NMT and a phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) model. We evaluate translations obtained with different systems and also discuss the data set of user-generated product listings, which in our case comprises both product listings and associated images. We found that humans preferred translations obtained with a PBSMT system to both text-only and multi-modal NMT over 56% of the time. Nonetheless, human evaluators ranked translations from a multi-modal NMT model as better than those of a text-only NMT over 88% of the time, which suggests that images do help NMT in this use-case.

In this paper we study the impact of using images to machine-translate user-generated e-commerce product listings. We study how a multi-modal Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model compares to two text-only approaches: a conventional state-of-the-art attentional NMT and a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) model. User-generated product listings often do not constitute grammatical or well-formed sentences. More often than not, they consist of the juxtaposition of short phrases or keywords. We train our models end-to-end as well as use text-only and multi-modal NMT models for re-ranking n-best lists generated by an SMT model. We qualitatively evaluate our user-generated training data also analyse how adding synthetic data impacts the results. We evaluate our models quantitatively using BLEU and TER and find that (i) additional synthetic data has a general positive impact on text-only and multi-modal NMT models, and that (ii) using a multi-modal NMT model for re-ranking n-best lists improves TER significantly across different n-best list sizes.

This paper discusses a methodology to measure the usability of machine translated content by end users, comparing lightly post-edited content with raw output and with the usability of source language content. The content selected consists of Online Help articles from a software company for a spreadsheet application, translated from English into German. Three groups of five users each used either the source text - the English version (EN) -, the raw MT version (DE_MT), or the light PE version (DE_PE), and were asked to carry out six tasks. Usability was measured using an eye tracker and cognitive, temporal and pragmatic measures of usability. Satisfaction was measured via a post-task questionnaire presented after the participants had completed the tasks.

Given the significant improvements in Machine Translation (MT) quality and the increasing demand for translations, post-editing of automatic translations is becoming a popular practice in the translation industry. It has been shown to allow for much larger volumes of translations to be produced, saving time and costs. In addition, the post-editing of automatic translations can help understand problems in such translations and this can be used as feedback for researchers and developers to improve MT systems. Finally, post-editing can be used as a way of evaluating the quality of translations in terms of how much post-editing effort these translations require. We describe a standalone tool that has two main purposes: facilitate the post-editing of translations from any MT system so that they reach publishable quality and collect sentence-level information from the post-editing process, e.g.: post-editing time and detailed keystroke statistics.