Feedback as an Interface: Controlling Form and Detail in LLM Translation Refinement

Yiqi Liu, Flavjo Tomori, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Steffen Eger, Chenghua Lin


Abstract
Feedback presentation shapes how LLMs use evaluator judgments during translation refinement. We introduce a machine translation protocol that keeps the evaluator score, main issue, and recommendation fixed while varying feedback form and supporting detail. Across seven models and six translation directions, low-load feedback outperforms high-load feedback in all 42 translator-direction settings under xCOMET. On the 29,400-record rewriting subset, mean xCOMET scores multiplied by 100 are 83.30 for low-load feedback and 80.67 for high-load feedback; the full-matrix original-translation reference mean is 83.46. MetricX-24 supports the low-load advantage on a stratified subset. A no-feedback second pass yields a small improvement over the original translations, and direct evaluator prompting reproduces the low-load advantage without a separate rewriting stage. These results show that compact feedback limits the quality loss from evaluator-guided refinement in the evaluated high-resource MT settings.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.61
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1204–1221
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.61/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiqi Liu, Flavjo Tomori, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Steffen Eger, and Chenghua Lin. 2026. Feedback as an Interface: Controlling Form and Detail in LLM Translation Refinement. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 1204–1221, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Feedback as an Interface: Controlling Form and Detail in LLM Translation Refinement (Liu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.61.pdf