An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human-Centered Machine Translation

Machine Translation (MT) tools are widely used today, often in contexts where professional translators are not present. Despite progress in MT technology, a gap persists between system development and real-world usage, particularly for non-expert users who may struggle to assess translation reliability. This paper advocates for a human-centered approach to MT, emphasizing the alignment of system design with diverse communicative goals and contexts of use. We survey the literature in Translation Studies and Human-Computer Interaction to recontextualize MT evaluation and design to address the diverse real-world scenarios in which MT is used today.

VietMix: A Naturally Occurring Vietnamese-English Code-Mixed Corpus with Iterative Augmentation for Machine Translation

Machine translation systems fail when processing code-mixed inputs for low-resource languages. We address this challenge by curating VietMix, a parallel corpus of naturally occurring code-mixed Vietnamese text paired with expert English translations. Augmenting this resource, we developed a complementary synthetic data generation pipeline. This pipeline incorporates filtering mechanisms to ensure syntactic plausibility and pragmatic appropriateness in code-mixing patterns. Experimental validation shows our naturalistic and complementary synthetic data boost models' performance, measured by translation quality estimation scores, of up to 71.84 on COMETkiwi and 81.77 on XCOMET. Triangulating positive results with LLM-based assessments, augmented models are favored over seed fine-tuned counterparts in approximately 49% of judgments (54-56% excluding ties). VietMix and our augmentation methodology advance ecological validity in neural MT evaluations and establish a framework for addressing code-mixed translation challenges across other low-resource pairs.

Should I Share this Translation? Evaluating Quality Feedback for User Reliance on Machine Translation

As people increasingly use AI systems in work and daily life, feedback mechanisms that help them use AI responsibly are urgently needed, particularly in settings where users are not equipped to assess the quality of AI predictions. We study a realistic Machine Translation (MT) scenario where monolingual users decide whether to share an MT output, first without and then with quality feedback. We compare four types of quality feedback: explicit feedback that directly give users an assessment of translation quality using 1) error highlights and 2) LLM explanations, and implicit feedback that helps users compare MT inputs and outputs through 3) backtranslation and 4) question-answer (QA) tables. We find that all feedback types, except error highlights, significantly improve both decision accuracy and appropriate reliance. Notably, implicit feedback, especially QA tables, yields significantly greater gains than explicit feedback in terms of decision accuracy, appropriate reliance, and user perceptions, receiving the highest ratings for helpfulness and trust, and the lowest for mental burden.

Multiple LLM Agents Debate for Equitable Cultural Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) need to adapt their predictions to diverse cultural contexts to benefit diverse communities across the world. While previous efforts have focused on single-LLM, single-turn approaches, we propose to exploit the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs to promote cultural adaptability. We introduce a Multi-Agent Debate framework, where two LLM-based agents debate over a cultural scenario and collaboratively reach a final decision. We propose two variants: one where either LLM agents exclusively debate and another where they dynamically choose between self-reflection and debate during their turns. We evaluate these approaches on 7 open-weight LLMs (and 21 LLM combinations) using the NormAd-ETI benchmark for social etiquette norms in 75 countries. Experiments show that debate improves both overall accuracy and cultural group parity over single-LLM baselines. Notably, multi-agent debate enables relatively small LLMs (7-9B) to achieve accuracies comparable to that of a much larger model (27B parameters).

Steering Large Language Models with Register Analysis for Arbitrary Style Transfer

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in rewriting text across various styles. However, effectively leveraging this ability for example-based arbitrary style transfer, where an input text is rewritten to match the style of a given exemplar, remains an open challenge. A key question is how to describe the style of the exemplar to guide LLMs toward high-quality rewrites. In this work, we propose a prompting method based on register analysis to guide LLMs to perform this task. Empirical evaluations across multiple style transfer tasks show that our prompting approach enhances style transfer strength while preserving meaning more effectively than existing prompting strategies.

GraphicBench: A Planning Benchmark for Graphic Design with Language Agents

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents have unlocked new possibilities for automating human tasks. While prior work has focused on well-defined tasks with specified goals, the capabilities of agents in creative design tasks with open-ended goals remain underexplored. We introduce GraphicBench, a new planning benchmark for graphic design that covers 1,079 user queries and input images across four design types. We further present GraphicTown, an LLM agent framework with three design experts and 46 actions (tools) to choose from for executing each step of the planned workflows in web environments. Experiments with six LLMs demonstrate their ability to generate workflows that integrate both explicit design constraints from user queries and implicit commonsense constraints. However, these workflows often do not lead to successful execution outcomes, primarily due to challenges in: (1) reasoning about spatial relationships, (2) coordinating global dependencies across experts, and (3) retrieving the most appropriate action per step. We envision GraphicBench as a challenging yet valuable testbed for advancing LLM-agent planning and execution in creative design tasks.

AskQE: Question Answering as Automatic Evaluation for Machine Translation

How can a monolingual English speaker determine whether an automatic translation in French is good enough to be shared? Existing MT error detection and quality estimation (QE) techniques do not address this practical scenario. We introduce AskQE, a question generation and answering framework designed to detect critical MT errors and provide actionable feedback, helping users decide whether to accept or reject MT outputs even without the knowledge of the target language. Using ContraTICO, a dataset of contrastive synthetic MT errors in the COVID-19 domain, we explore design choices for AskQE and develop an optimized version relying on LLaMA-3 70B and entailed facts to guide question generation. We evaluate the resulting system on the BioMQM dataset of naturally occurring MT errors, where AskQE has higher Kendall's Tau correlation and decision accuracy with human ratings compared to other QE metrics.

Can you map it to English? The Role of Cross-Lingual Alignment in Multilingual Performance of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained predominantly on English text exhibit surprising multilingual capabilities, yet the mechanisms driving cross-lingual generalization remain poorly understood. This work investigates how the alignment of representations for text written in different languages correlates with LLM performance on natural language understanding tasks and translation tasks, both at the language and the instance level. For this purpose, we introduce cross-lingual alignment metrics such as the Discriminative Alignment Index (DALI) to quantify the alignment at an instance level for discriminative tasks. Through experiments on three natural language understanding tasks (Belebele, XStoryCloze, XCOPA), and machine translation, we find that while cross-lingual alignment metrics strongly correlate with task accuracy at the language level, the sample-level alignment often fails to distinguish correct from incorrect predictions, exposing alignment as a necessary but insufficient condition for success.

Automatic Input Rewriting Improves Translation with Large Language Models

Can we improve machine translation (MT) with LLMs by rewriting their inputs automatically? Users commonly rely on the intuition that well-written text is easier to translate when using off-the-shelf MT systems. LLMs can rewrite text in many ways but in the context of MT, these capabilities have been primarily exploited to rewrite outputs via post-editing. We present an empirical study of 21 input rewriting methods with 3 open-weight LLMs for translating from English into 6 target languages. We show that text simplification is the most effective MT-agnostic rewrite strategy and that it can be improved further when using quality estimation to assess translatability. Human evaluation further confirms that simplified rewrites and their MT outputs both largely preserve the original meaning of the source and MT. These results suggest LLM-assisted input rewriting as a promising direction for improving translations.

Findings of the IWSLT 2024 Evaluation Campaign

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 18 teams whose submissions are documented in 26 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.