Dawid Wiśniewski

Author directory

Also published as: Dawid Wisniewski


2026

Preserving affective nuance remains a challenge in Machine Translation (MT), where semantic equivalence often takes precedence over emotional fidelity. This paper evaluates the performance of three state-of-the-art Small Language Models (SLMs) – EuroLLM, Aya Expanse, and Gemma – in maintaining fine-grained emotions during backtranslation. Using the GoEmotions dataset, which comprises Reddit comments across 28 distinct categories, we assess emotional preservation across five European languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Polish. Specifically, we investigate (i) the inherent capability of these SLMs to retain emotional sentiment, (ii) the efficacy of emotion-aware prompting in improving preservation, and (iii) the performance of ModernBERT as a contemporary alternative to BERT for emotion classification in MT evaluation.
We present ForMaT (Format-Preserving Multilingual Translation), a parallel corpus of 3,956 PDFs across 15 language pairs that preserves original layout metadata proposed for multimodal machine translation. To ensure structural diversity in the dataset, we employ K-Medoids sampling over 45 geometric features, capturing complex elements like nested tables and formulas to focus only on visually diverse PDF documents. Our evaluation reveals that current MT systems struggle with spatial grounding and geometric synchronization, often losing the link between text and its visual context. ForMaT provides a benchmark for developing layout-aware translation models that integrate visual and textual context for high-fidelity document reconstruction.

2025

Current machine translation models provide us with high-quality outputs in most scenarios. However, they still face some specific problems, such as detecting which entities should not be changed during translation. In this paper, we explore the abilities of popular NMT models, including models from the OPUS project, Google Translate, MADLAD, and EuroLLM, to preserve entities such as URL addresses, IBAN numbers, or emails when producing translations between four languages: English, German, Polish, and Ukrainian. We investigate the quality of popular NMT models in terms of accuracy, discuss errors made by the models, and examine the reasons for errors. Our analysis highlights specific categories, such as emojis, that pose significant challenges for many models considered. In addition to the analysis, we propose a new multilingual synthetic dataset of 36,000 sentences that can help assess the quality of entity transfer across nine categories and four aforementioned languages.
Recent language models can successfully solve various language-related tasks, and many understand inputs stated in different languages. In this paper, we explore the performance of 17 popular models used to correct grammatical issues in texts stated in English, German, Italian, and Swedish when using a single model to correct texts in all those languages. We analyze the outputs generated by these models, focusing on decreasing the number of grammatical errors while keeping the changes small. The conclusions drawn help us understand what problems occur among those models and which models can be recommended for multilingual grammatical error correction tasks. We list six models that improve grammatical correctness in all four languages and show that Gemma 9B is currently the best performing one for the languages considered.

2024

People use language for various purposes. Apart from sharing information, individuals may use it to express emotions or to show respect for another person. In this paper, we focus on the formality level of machine-generated translations and present FAME-MT – a dataset consisting of 11.2 million translations between 15 European source languages and 8 European target languages classified to formal and informal classes according to target sentence formality. This dataset can be used to fine-tune machine translation models to ensure a given formality level for 8 European target languages considered. We describe the dataset creation procedure, the analysis of the dataset’s quality showing that FAME-MT is a reliable source of language register information, and we construct a publicly available proof-of-concept machine translation model that uses the dataset to steer the formality level of the translation. Currently, it is the largest dataset of formality annotations, with examples expressed in 112 European language pairs. The dataset is made available online.

2020

Semi-structured text generation is a non-trivial problem. Although last years have brought lots of improvements in natural language generation, thanks to the development of neural models trained on large scale datasets, these approaches still struggle with producing structured, context- and commonsense-aware texts. Moreover, it is not clear how to evaluate the quality of generated texts. To address these problems, we introduce RecipeNLG – a novel dataset of cooking recipes. We discuss the data collection process and the relation between the semi-structured texts and cooking recipes. We use the dataset to approach the problem of generating recipes. Finally, we make use of multiple metrics to evaluate the generated recipes.
We propose a new shared task of semantic retrieval from legal texts, in which a so-called contract discovery is to be performed – where legal clauses are extracted from documents, given a few examples of similar clauses from other legal acts. The task differs substantially from conventional NLI and shared tasks on legal information extraction (e.g., one has to identify text span instead of a single document, page, or paragraph). The specification of the proposed task is followed by an evaluation of multiple solutions within the unified framework proposed for this branch of methods. It is shown that state-of-the-art pretrained encoders fail to provide satisfactory results on the task proposed. In contrast, Language Model-based solutions perform better, especially when unsupervised fine-tuning is applied. Besides the ablation studies, we addressed questions regarding detection accuracy for relevant text fragments depending on the number of examples available. In addition to the dataset and reference results, LMs specialized in the legal domain were made publicly available.