Benjamin Pong
Author directory2026
Post-hoc Correction of Machine Translation Error Span Predictions
Benjamin Pong
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Benjamin Pong
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
This paper presents an unsupervised quality estimation metric for machine translation that combines both neural and LLM models to identify and classify error spans for machine translations. As a submission to the WMT2026 Automated Evaluation Shared Task 1, this system builds on XCOMET-XL by applying offsets to the logits produced by the neural metric, post-hoc, to address the long-tailed probability problem, and uses an LLM as a second-stage to refine these predictions. Results show that XCOMET-XL with logits offset alone shows a boost in recall and character-level F1 scores for error span classifications across multiple language pairs, surpassing state-of-the-art baseline (i.e XCOMET-XL) and LLM-based approaches. This system also comprises a second-stage where a reasoning LLM-judge is employed to audit the error spans predicted by the logits-adjusted XCOMET metric, whose goal is to reduce spurious error classifications and improve overall precision. Results show that using LLM-judge to refine error spans provides no measurable improvements over predictions of the logits-adjusted XCOMET metric.
Towards Dynamic Attention Masking for Simultaneous Speech Translation
Benjamin Pong
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026)
Benjamin Pong
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026)
We present a proof-of-concept system for simultaneous speech translation based on dynamic attention masking. Our approach builds on SeamlessM4T by injecting lightweight per-layer schedulers into the conformer-encoder, training each scheduler to predict the number of future frames needed for translation. The schedulers are trained jointly with LoRA adapters across three language directions: English to German, Italian, and Chinese. At inference time, we evaluate our system using sliding window retranslation inference regime (Sen et al., 2022), and an adapted version of StreamAtt (Papi et al., 2024) that replaces the fixed cutoff with a content-aware threshold derived from the learnt representations from the scheduler outputs.
2025
Contextual Selection of Pseudo-terminology Constraints for Terminology-aware Neural Machine Translation in the IT Domain
Benjamin Pong
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation
Benjamin Pong
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation
This system paper describes the development of a Neural Machine Translation system that is adapted to the Information Technology (IT) domain, and is able to translate specialized IT-related terminologies. Despite the popularity of incorporating terminology constraints at training time to develop terminology-aware Neural Machine Translation engines, one of the main issues is: In the absence of terminology references for training, and with the proliferation of source-target alignments, how does one select word alignments as pseudo-terminology constraints? The system in this work uses the encoder’s final hidden states as proxies for terminologies, and selects word alignments with the highest norm as pseudo-terminology constraints for inline annotation at run-time. It compares this context-based approach against a conventional statistical approach, where terminology-constraints are selected based on a low-frequency threshold. The systems were evaluated for general translation quality and Terminology Success Rates, with results that validate the effectiveness of the contextual approach.