Enhancing Large Language Models for Document-Level Translation Post-Editing Using Monolingual Data

Zongyao Li, Zhiqiang Rao, Hengchao Shang, Jiaxin Guo, Shaojun Li, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang


Abstract
The translation capabilities of neural machine translation (NMT) models based on the encoder-decoder framework are extremely potent. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results in many tasks, they have not reached state-of-the-art performance in NMT. However, traditional NMT still faces significant challenges in areas of document translation such as context consistency, tense, and pronoun resolution, where LLMs inherently possess substantial advantages. Instead of directly using LLMs for translation, employing them for Automatic Post-Editing (APE) to post-edit NMT outputs proves to be a viable option. However, document-level bilingual data is extremely scarce. This paper proposes a method that can effectively leverage the capabilities of LLMs to optimize document translation using only monolingual data. By employing two NMT models in opposite directions (Source-to-Target and Target-to-Source), we generate pseudo-document training data for the training of APE. We have identified and resolved the issue between training and inference mode inconsistency brought about by the pseudo-document training data. The final experimental results demonstrate that by using only document-level monolingual data, we can significantly improve the quality of NMT and greatly enhance issues such as reference and contextual consistency in NMT.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.591
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8830–8840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.591/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zongyao Li, Zhiqiang Rao, Hengchao Shang, Jiaxin Guo, Shaojun Li, Daimeng Wei, and Hao Yang. 2025. Enhancing Large Language Models for Document-Level Translation Post-Editing Using Monolingual Data. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8830–8840, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Large Language Models for Document-Level Translation Post-Editing Using Monolingual Data (Li et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.591.pdf