NCI-MT at WMT 2026: A Quality-Gated Cascade for Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Machine Translation

Satarupa Deb, Prashanth Nayak


Abstract
This paper describes NCI-MT’s submission to the low-resource Arabic-to-Asian language translation task as part of the WMT shared task. Our submission covered six of the ten language pairs. We built two separate systems, the primary and the contrastive. The primary was built using the data provided by WMT. In this approach, we fine-tuned our baseline model (NLLB) with per-direction LoRA adapters. For the contrastive system, we introduced an additional quality-gated refinement stage, which includes two stages: in the first stage, we use a reference-free quality estimator to evaluate the quality of the translations produced by our base model. In the second stage, we iteratively re-translate those translations that are below a certain threshold using LLM-based in-context learning. Our results show that both systems are successful in improving the translation quality in low-resource scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.170
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venues:
WMT | WS
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2298–2303
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.170/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Satarupa Deb and Prashanth Nayak. 2026. NCI-MT at WMT 2026: A Quality-Gated Cascade for Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 2298–2303, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NCI-MT at WMT 2026: A Quality-Gated Cascade for Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Machine Translation (Deb & Nayak, WMT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.170.pdf