Aaron Schliem
Author directory2026
Embedding Similarity Is Not Quality Estimation: Lessons from Replacing a Dedicated QE Model
Dimitrios Zaikis | Andrea Biondo | Matthew Dixon | Konstantinos Karageorgos | Aaron Schliem
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)
Dimitrios Zaikis | Andrea Biondo | Matthew Dixon | Konstantinos Karageorgos | Aaron Schliem
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)
Machine translation quality estimation (QE) typically relies on dedicated neural models trained on human judgments. We evaluate whether cosine similarity over general-purpose embeddings can serve as a lightweight alternative, using Gemini embeddings as the scoring backbone. Through three experiments (rogue dimension analysis, score calibration, and a learned calibration head) and a root cause analysis, we find that cosine similarity between source and translation saturates in the 0.94–0.99 range because even poor translations preserve most of the source semantics, leaving an Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) ceiling of approximately 0.63. However, a LightGBM classifier trained on normalized cosine and surface-level text features breaks through this ceiling (AUC 0.751), with the improvement driven primarily by features orthogonal to embedding similarity.
2025
OPAL Enable: Revolutionizing Localization Through Advanced AI
Mara Nunziatini | Konstantinos Karageorgos | Aaron Schliem | Mikaela Grace
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 2
Mara Nunziatini | Konstantinos Karageorgos | Aaron Schliem | Mikaela Grace
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 2
This paper discusses the capabilities and benefits of OPAL Enable, an advanced AI suite designed to modernize localization processes. The suite comprises Machine Translation, AI Post-Editing, and AI Quality Estimation tools, integrated into renowned translation management systems. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of these features, detailing their procedural order, and the time and cost savings they offer. It emphasizes the customization potential of OPAL Enable to meet client-specific requirements, increase scalability, and expedite workflows.
LangMark: A Multilingual Dataset for Automatic Post-Editing
Diego Velazquez | Mikaela Grace | Konstantinos Karageorgos | Lawrence Carin | Aaron Schliem | Dimitrios Zaikis | Roger Wechsler
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diego Velazquez | Mikaela Grace | Konstantinos Karageorgos | Lawrence Carin | Aaron Schliem | Dimitrios Zaikis | Roger Wechsler
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Automatic post-editing (APE) aims to correct errors in machine-translated text, enhancing translation quality, while reducing the need for human intervention. Despite advances in neural machine translation (NMT), the development of effective APE systems has been hindered by the lack of large-scale multilingual datasets specifically tailored to NMT outputs. To address this gap, we present and release LangMark, a new human-annotated multilingual APE dataset for English translation to seven languages: Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The dataset has 206,983 triplets, with each triplet consisting of a source segment, its NMT output, and a human post-edited translation. Annotated by expert human linguists, our dataset offers both linguistic diversity and scale. Leveraging this dataset, we empirically show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot prompting can effectively perform APE, improving upon leading commercial and even proprietary machine translation systems. We believe that this new resource will facilitate the future development and evaluation of APE systems.