TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement

Zhaopeng Feng, Yan Zhang, Hao Li, Bei Wu, Jiayu Liao, Wenqiang Liu, Jun Lang, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation (MT). However, human evaluations reveal that LLM-generated translations still contain various errors. Notably, feeding the error information back into the LLMs can facilitate self-refinement, leading to enhanced translation quality. Motivated by these findings, we introduce TEaR (Translate, Estimate, and Refine), a systematic LLM-based self-refinement framework aimed at bootstrapping translation performance. Our key results show that: 1) TEaR framework enables LLMs to improve their translation quality relying solely on self-feedback, measured by both automatic metrics and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) scores; 2) TEaR autonomously selects improvements, ensuring a robust translation quality baseline while outperforming both internal refinement and external feedback methods. Error analysis and iterative refinement experiments show its ability to continuously reduce translation errors and enhance overall translation quality. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/fzp0424/self_correct_mt.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.218
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3922–3938
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.218/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaopeng Feng, Yan Zhang, Hao Li, Bei Wu, Jiayu Liao, Wenqiang Liu, Jun Lang, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, and Zuozhu Liu. 2025. TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 3922–3938, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement (Feng et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.218.pdf