Domain-Specific Quality Estimation for Machine Translation in Low-Resource Scenarios

Namrata Bhalchandra Patil Gurav, Akashdeep Ranu, Archchana Sindhujan, Diptesh Kanojia


Abstract
Quality Estimation (QE) is essential for assessing machine translation quality in reference-less settings, particularly for domain-specific and low-resource language scenarios. In this paper, we investigate sentence-level QE for English to Indic machine translation across four domains (Healthcare, Legal, Tourism, and General) and five language pairs. We systematically compare zero-shot, few-shot, and guideline-anchored prompting across selected closed-weight and open-weight LLMs. Findings indicate that while closed-weight models achieve strong performance via prompting alone, prompt-only approaches remain fragile for open-weight models, especially in high-risk domains. To address this, we adopt ALOPE, a framework for LLM-based QE which uses Low-Rank Adaptation with regression heads attached to selected intermediate Transformer layers. We also extend ALOPE with the recently proposed Low-Rank Multiplicative Adaptation (LoRMA) for this work. Our results show that intermediate-layer adaptation consistently improves QE performance, with gains in semantically complex domains, indicating a way ahead for robust QE in practical scenarios. We release code and domain-specific QE datasets publicly for further research.
Anthology ID:
2026.loreslm-1.55
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Alistair Plum, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venue:
LoResLM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
630–650
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.55/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Namrata Bhalchandra Patil Gurav, Akashdeep Ranu, Archchana Sindhujan, and Diptesh Kanojia. 2026. Domain-Specific Quality Estimation for Machine Translation in Low-Resource Scenarios. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026), pages 630–650, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain-Specific Quality Estimation for Machine Translation in Low-Resource Scenarios (Gurav et al., LoResLM 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.55.pdf