Xiaojing Zhao


2025

pdf bib
Learning to Look at the Other Side: A Semantic Probing Study of Word Embeddings in LLMs with Enabled Bidirectional Attention
Zhaoxin Feng | Jianfei Ma | Emmanuele Chersoni | Xiaojing Zhao | Xiaoyi Bao
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in language understanding and generation. However, their application in text embedding tasks has been relatively slow, along with the analysis of their semantic representation in probing tasks, due to the constraints of the unidirectional attention mechanism. This paper aims to explore whether such constraints can be overcome by enabling bidirectional attention in LLMs. We tested different variants of the Llama architecture through additional training steps, progressively enabling bidirectional attention and unsupervised/supervised contrastive learning. Our results show that bidirectional attention improves the LLMs’ ability to represent subsequent context but weakens their utilization of preceding context, while contrastive learning training can help to maintain both abilities.

pdf bib
Can LLMs Help Sun Wukong in his Journey to the West? A Case Study of Language Models in Video Game Localization
Xiaojing Zhao | Han Xu | Huacheng Song | Emmanuele Chersoni | Chu-Ren Huang
Proceedings of the First on Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing proficiency in general-purpose translation, yet their effectiveness in creative domains such as game localization remains underexplored. This study focuses on the role of LLMs in game localization from both linguistic quality and sociocultural adequacy through a case study of the video game Black Myth: Wukong. Results indicate that LLMs demonstrate adequate competence in accuracy and fluency, achieving performance comparable to human translators. However, limitations remain in the literal translation of culture-specific terms and offensive language. Human oversight is required to ensure nuanced cultural authenticity and sensitivity. Insights from human evaluations also suggest that current automatic metrics and the Multidimensional Quality Metrics framework may be inadequate for evaluating creative translation. Finally, varying human preferences in localization pose a learning ambiguity for LLMs to perform optimal translation strategies. The findings highlight the potential and shortcomings of LLMs to serve as collaborative tools in game localization workflows. Data are available at https://github.com/zcocozz/wukong-localization.