@inproceedings{zheng-etal-2026-mas,
title = "{MAS}-{B}ai: Linguistically Informed Adaptive Multi-Agent Translation for Bowen-Script {B}ai",
author = "Zheng, Jingting and
Ren, Hong and
Cui, Yuehan and
Zhu, Shaolin and
Xiong, Deyi",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2234/",
pages = "47821--47834",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) remain unreliable for extremely low-resource languages whose writing systems conflict with high-resource pretraining priors. We study Bai-Chinese translation in the Bowen script, where Chinese characters are frequently borrowed phonetically rather than semantically, causing severe literal-translation hallucinations. We propose $MAS$-$Bai$, a linguistically informed adaptive multi-agent framework for Bowen-script Bai-Chinese translation. MAS-Bai routes each input through either a lightweight retrieval-translation path or a deeper philological path with etymological and syntactic agents, and uses cycle-consistency with a lightweight reverse translator as an inference-time reliability signal. We construct a 6,536-sentence Bai-Chinese corpus and evaluate on a 1,536-sentence test set. MAS-Bai achieves 16.23 BLEU and 62.15 COMET, improving over Standard RAG by 8.11 BLEU and 6.85 COMET. Forward LoRA, expert ablations and controlled routing experiments distinguish the roles of supervised adaptation, Bai-specific expertise and conditional routing. The largest gains occur on Bowen phonetic loans and divergent Bai word order, while human evaluation and reverse-verifier analyses support the automatic results."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T MAS-Bai: Linguistically Informed Adaptive Multi-Agent Translation for Bowen-Script Bai
%A Zheng, Jingting
%A Ren, Hong
%A Cui, Yuehan
%A Zhu, Shaolin
%A Xiong, Deyi
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F zheng-etal-2026-mas
%X Large Language Models (LLMs) remain unreliable for extremely low-resource languages whose writing systems conflict with high-resource pretraining priors. We study Bai-Chinese translation in the Bowen script, where Chinese characters are frequently borrowed phonetically rather than semantically, causing severe literal-translation hallucinations. We propose MAS-Bai, a linguistically informed adaptive multi-agent framework for Bowen-script Bai-Chinese translation. MAS-Bai routes each input through either a lightweight retrieval-translation path or a deeper philological path with etymological and syntactic agents, and uses cycle-consistency with a lightweight reverse translator as an inference-time reliability signal. We construct a 6,536-sentence Bai-Chinese corpus and evaluate on a 1,536-sentence test set. MAS-Bai achieves 16.23 BLEU and 62.15 COMET, improving over Standard RAG by 8.11 BLEU and 6.85 COMET. Forward LoRA, expert ablations and controlled routing experiments distinguish the roles of supervised adaptation, Bai-specific expertise and conditional routing. The largest gains occur on Bowen phonetic loans and divergent Bai word order, while human evaluation and reverse-verifier analyses support the automatic results.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2234/
%P 47821-47834
Markdown (Informal)
[MAS-Bai: Linguistically Informed Adaptive Multi-Agent Translation for Bowen-Script Bai](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2234/) (Zheng et al., Findings 2026)
ACL