yukajii / MT digest
Indic corpus, tag-aware translation and Arabic error spans
arXiv announcements of 24 September 2026 · 4 papers
COILD pushes MT for Indian languages in a more grounded direction, with over 1.16 million human-translated and human-verified sentence pairs across 20 language pairs, while the tag-aware translation paper argues the harder problem is not data scarcity but how to keep format tags intact without wrecking naturalness. On the evaluation side, TTLab’s Arabic error-span system reaches 40.8 on development and 40.91 on test with MARBERTv2, yet the ERG study finds LLMs can generate Minimal Recursion Semantics they still cannot parse reliably, using a reconstructed 10K-sentence test split to make that asymmetry visible.
COILD gives you 1.16 million human-translated, human-verified sentence pairs across 20 Indian language pairs plus a 2,000-sentence benchmark, and it improves IndicTrans2-Distilled and NLLB-200 across domains.
Abstract
Machine translation (MT) for Indian languages remains constrained by the limited availability of high-quality, Indic-centric parallel corpora and evaluation benchmarks. Existing multilingual resources are largely constructed from English-pivot content and often fail to capture the linguistic diversity, cultural complexity, and domain-specific characteristics of Indian languages. We present COILD, an Indic-centric parallel corpus comprising over 1.16 million human-translated and human-verified sentence pairs, covering 20 Indian language pairs across the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austro-Asiatic language families. The corpus is built entirely from original Indian language sources collected from licensed repositories spanning eight domains with direct real-world applicability. Furthermore, we introduce a domain-centric benchmark comprising 2,000 expert-verified sentences to enable consistent multilingual and cross-lingual evaluation across Indian language pairs. To validate the effectiveness of COILD, we fine-tune two representative multilingual neural machine translation models, IndicTrans2-Distilled and NLLB-200. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements across language pairs, domains, automatic evaluation metrics, and human evaluation, highlighting the effectiveness of high-quality Indic-centric supervision. COILD provides a valuable training and evaluation resource for advancing multilingual machine translation and future multilingual language models for Indian languages.
Tag-aware translation needs both natural text and tag fidelity, so Hy-LST’s hybrid synthesis, four-task fine-tuning, and three-reward alignment are the concrete levers to watch for structured content.
Abstract
Internet texts are replete with format tags that carry structural, semantic, and functional meaning. Current large language model (LLM)-based translation systems struggle to balance translation fluency with tag fidelity when processing tagged text. We argue that resolving this tension requires a systematic approach at three interconnected levels: data synthesis, capability building, and multi-objective alignment. At the data level, we identify and formalize a fundamental trade-off between structural tag diversity and translation naturalness in synthetic data generation; existing methods optimize for one at the expense of the other. We propose a hybrid synthesis strategy (Hy-LST) combining LLM-based synthesis tag method and Two-Stage LLM-based synthesis tag method to produce both diverse and natural tagged data. At the capability level, we decompose tag-aware translation into four sub-tasks of increasing difficulty in a multi-task supervised fine-tuning framework, enabling targeted capability acquisition and knowledge transfer. At the alignment level, we design three complementary reward functions under a group relative policy optimization framework, each targeting a distinct objective (fluency, tag fidelity, and tag-scoped translation quality), and show that joint optimization consistently outperforms single-reward alternatives. Experiments on six language directions (en2zh, en2ja, en2de, en2fr, en2ru, de2fr) demonstrate that each level contributes measurable improvements, and the complete system significantly outperforms existing methods. Qualitative analysis reveals specific error patterns and their mitigation after training with our method.
For Arabic MT error-span detection, a surface-token tagger with MARBERTv2, focal loss, and class weighting reaches 40.8/40.91, but rare error types still need augmentation.
Abstract
We present TTLab's submission to the AlexandriaX-2026 Subtask~3 on Arabic MT error span detection and classification. Our system frames the task as token-level classification over surface forms, preserving character offsets to ensure exact alignment with the evaluation metric. To handle severe label imbalance, we employ a focal loss with class weighting and dialect-specific decoding thresholds. Among six Arabic pre-trained encoders, MARBERTv2 achieves the best overall performance of 40.8 and 40.91 on the development and test set, respectively, ranking nth3 out of all participating teams. While our system localizes error spans effectively, classification of rare error types remains challenging, highlighting the need for data augmentation for tail categories. The code is available at [faGithub~ TTLab at AlexandriaX-2026](https://github.com/ENTAILab/arabic-dialectal-mt-error-span-detection)
For meaning-representation translation, LLMs can generate MRS-to-text well with few-shot prompting, but their MRS parsing remains far behind ACE, so they are safer as generators than analyzers.
Abstract
The English Resource Grammar (ERG) is a hand-written computational grammar of English. Given a sentence, its processor, ACE, produces a formal meaning representation called Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS): a graph of the sentence's predicates and their arguments. The grammar is bidirectional and can also turn an MRS back into an English sentence. used the ERG's treebank to build a benchmark for that generation task, MRS to text, and trained sequence-to-sequence models to solve it. The parsing task, text to MRS, can be tested on the same sentences. We reconstruct their 10K-sentence test split, and score two large language models, Claude Sonnet~4.5 and Claude Opus~5, in both directions against their trained systems and against ACE, with no task-specific training. Given an MRS and three examples, Opus writes the sentence at 76.3 BLEU, ten points above their system trained on 72k pairs (66.1 BLEU), and comparable to their system trained on a million extra pairs (77.2 BLEU). Sonnet scores 65.7 BLEU, and letting it choose among ACE's own candidate sentences lifts it to 69.6, while a pooled judge that keeps Opus's own sentence among the candidates adds 0.6 points (77.0 BLEU). In the parsing direction, however, the models fall far behind ACE: asked for the MRS of the same sentences, they reach 57.2 (Sonnet) and 65.5 (Opus) F_1 on the graph's predicates and arguments against 91.0 for ACE, and exact-match the gold on about 1% of sentences. We characterize the failure modes for the parsing tasks, and conclude that a generation score alone does not show that models understand formal semantic representations.