When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic--Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic--Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form--meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.

ComplexityMT: Benchmarking the Interaction Between Text Complexity and Machine Translation

When a text is translated, does the translation retain the complexity of the original? We introduce ComplexityMT, a new challenge for assessing how text complexity and machine translation interact with and influence each other, using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) levels as the measure of text complexity. Across six languages, including Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Hindi, and Russian, we evaluate three open-weight models, one closed model, and a commercial machine translation system on two tasks: i) correlation of CEFR with translation difficulty, and ii) shifts in CEFR levels of the source texts. Our experiments show that higher CEFR levels make texts more difficult to translate, and that machine translation shifts the CEFR level of the target text compared to the original source, for most languages. These findings provide new insights for researchers and practitioners working on multilingual pedagogical content generation and machine translation difficulty estimation.

ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services

Recent image generation and editing models demonstrate robust adherence to instructions and high visual quality on academic benchmarks. However, their performance on paid, real-world design projects remains uncertain. We introduce \textbf{ServImage}, a benchmark that explicitly correlates model outputs with economic value in commercial design projects. ServImage consists of (i) \textbf{\textit{ServImageBench}}: a dataset of 1.07k paid commercial design tasks and 2.05k designer deliverables totaling over \$295k, covering portrait, product, and digital content, along with 33k candidate images and 33k human annotations. (ii) \textbf{\textit{ServImageScore}}: an integrated scoring system that combines three quality dimensions: baseline requirements fulfilment, visual execution quality, and commercial necessity satisfaction. These three dimensions are designed to characterize the factors that drive human payment decisions and indicate whether an image is commercially acceptable. (iii) \textbf{\textit{ServImageModel}}: under this scoring system, we propose a payment prediction model trained on the human-annotated candidate images, achieving 82.00\% accuracy in predicting human payment decisions and producing calibrated payment probabilities. ServImage provides a comprehensive foundation for assessing the commercial viability of image generation models and offers a scalable resource for future research on economically grounded vision systems \href{https://github.com/FengxianJi/ServImage}{Github.}

MTCSC: Retrieval-Augmented Iterative Refinement for Chinese Spelling Correction

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous tokens in sentences. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in identifying and rectifying potential errors, they often struggle with maintaining consistent output lengths and adapting to domain-specific corrections. Furthermore, existing CSC task impose rigid constraints requiring input and output lengths to be identical, limiting their applicability. In this work, we extend traditional CSC to variable-length correction scenarios, including Chinese Splitting Error Correction (CSEC) and ASR N-best Error Correction. To address domain adaptation and length consistency, we propose MTCSC (Multi-Turn CSC) framework based on RAG enhanced with a length reflection mechanism. Our approach constructs a retrieval database from domain-specific training data and dictionaries, fine-tuning retrievers to optimize performance for error-containing inputs. Additionally, we introduce a multi-source combination strategy with iterative length reflection to ensure output length fidelity. Experiments across diverse domain datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current approaches in correction quality, particularly in handling domain-specific and variable-length error correction tasks.

PERL: Pinyin Enhanced Rephrasing Language Model for Chinese ASR N-best Error Correction

ASR correction methods have predominantly focused on general datasets and have not effectively utilized Pinyin information, unique to the Chinese language. In this study, we address this gap by proposing a Pinyin Enhanced Rephrasing Language Model (PERL), specifically designed for N-best correction scenarios. Additionally, we implement a length predictor module to address the variable-length problem. We conduct experiments on the Aishell-1 dataset and our newly proposed DoAD dataset. The results show that our approach outperforms baseline methods, achieving a 29.11% reduction in Character Error Rate (CER) on Aishell-1 and around 70% CER reduction on domain-specific datasets. Furthermore, our approach leverages Pinyin similarity at the token level, providing an advantage over baselines and leading to superior performance.

An Analysis of Language Frequency and Error Correction for Esperanto

Current Grammar Error Correction (GEC) initiatives tend to focus on major languages, with less attention given to low-resource languages like Esperanto. In this article, we begin to bridge this gap by first conducting a comprehensive frequency analysis using the Eo-GP dataset, created explicitly for this purpose. We then introduce the Eo-GEC dataset, derived from authentic user cases and annotated with fine-grained linguistic details for error identification. Leveraging GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, our experiments show that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5 in both automated and human evaluations, highlighting its efficacy in addressing Esperanto's grammatical peculiarities and illustrating the potential of advanced language models to enhance GEC strategies for less commonly studied languages.