@inproceedings{ma-etal-2026-bidirectional,
title = "Bidirectional {C}hinese and {E}nglish Passive Sentences Dataset for Machine Translation",
author = "Ma, Xinyue and
Pastells, Pol and
Farrus, Mireia and
Taule, Mariona",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.681/",
doi = "10.63317/3cj49u95jf24",
pages = "8628--8638",
abstract = "Machine Translation (MT) evaluation has gone beyond metrics, towards more specific linguistic phenomena. Regarding English-Chinese language pairs, passive sentences are constructed and distributed differently due to language variation, thus need special attention in MT. This paper proposes a bidirectional multi-domain dataset of passive sentences, extracted from five Chinese-English parallel corpora and annotated automatically with structure labels according to human translation, and a test set with manually verified annotation. The dataset consists of 73,965 parallel sentence pairs (2,358,731 English words, 3,498,229 Chinese characters). We evaluate two state-of-the-art open-source MT systems with our dataset, and four commercial models with the test set. The results show that, unlike humans, models are more influenced by the voice of the source text rather than the general voice usage of the source language, and therefore tend to maintain the passive voice when translating a passive in either direction. However, models demonstrate some knowledge of the low frequency and predominantly negative context of Chinese passives, leading to higher voice consistency with human translators in English-to-Chinese translation than in Chinese-to-English translation. Commercial NMT models scored higher in metric evaluations, but LLMs showed a better ability to use diverse alternative translations. Datasets and annotation script will be shared upon request."
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<abstract>Machine Translation (MT) evaluation has gone beyond metrics, towards more specific linguistic phenomena. Regarding English-Chinese language pairs, passive sentences are constructed and distributed differently due to language variation, thus need special attention in MT. This paper proposes a bidirectional multi-domain dataset of passive sentences, extracted from five Chinese-English parallel corpora and annotated automatically with structure labels according to human translation, and a test set with manually verified annotation. The dataset consists of 73,965 parallel sentence pairs (2,358,731 English words, 3,498,229 Chinese characters). We evaluate two state-of-the-art open-source MT systems with our dataset, and four commercial models with the test set. The results show that, unlike humans, models are more influenced by the voice of the source text rather than the general voice usage of the source language, and therefore tend to maintain the passive voice when translating a passive in either direction. However, models demonstrate some knowledge of the low frequency and predominantly negative context of Chinese passives, leading to higher voice consistency with human translators in English-to-Chinese translation than in Chinese-to-English translation. Commercial NMT models scored higher in metric evaluations, but LLMs showed a better ability to use diverse alternative translations. Datasets and annotation script will be shared upon request.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Bidirectional Chinese and English Passive Sentences Dataset for Machine Translation
%A Ma, Xinyue
%A Pastells, Pol
%A Farrus, Mireia
%A Taule, Mariona
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F ma-etal-2026-bidirectional
%X Machine Translation (MT) evaluation has gone beyond metrics, towards more specific linguistic phenomena. Regarding English-Chinese language pairs, passive sentences are constructed and distributed differently due to language variation, thus need special attention in MT. This paper proposes a bidirectional multi-domain dataset of passive sentences, extracted from five Chinese-English parallel corpora and annotated automatically with structure labels according to human translation, and a test set with manually verified annotation. The dataset consists of 73,965 parallel sentence pairs (2,358,731 English words, 3,498,229 Chinese characters). We evaluate two state-of-the-art open-source MT systems with our dataset, and four commercial models with the test set. The results show that, unlike humans, models are more influenced by the voice of the source text rather than the general voice usage of the source language, and therefore tend to maintain the passive voice when translating a passive in either direction. However, models demonstrate some knowledge of the low frequency and predominantly negative context of Chinese passives, leading to higher voice consistency with human translators in English-to-Chinese translation than in Chinese-to-English translation. Commercial NMT models scored higher in metric evaluations, but LLMs showed a better ability to use diverse alternative translations. Datasets and annotation script will be shared upon request.
%R 10.63317/3cj49u95jf24
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.681/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/3cj49u95jf24
%P 8628-8638
Markdown (Informal)
[Bidirectional Chinese and English Passive Sentences Dataset for Machine Translation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.681/) (Ma et al., LREC 2026)
ACL