English

Can QE-informed (Re)Translation lead to Error Correction?

Computation and Language 2025-11-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The paper presents two approaches submitted to the WMT 2025 Automated Translation Quality Evaluation Systems Task 3 - Quality Estimation (QE)-informed Segment-level Error Correction. While jointly training QE systems with Automatic Post-Editing (APE) has shown improved performance for both tasks, APE systems are still known to overcorrect the output of Machine Translation (MT), leading to a degradation in performance. We investigate a simple training-free approach - QE-informed Retranslation, and compare it with another within the same training-free paradigm. Our winning approach selects the highest-quality translation from multiple candidates generated by different LLMs. The second approach, more akin to APE, instructs an LLM to replace error substrings as specified in the provided QE explanation(s). A conditional heuristic was employed to minimise the number of edits, with the aim of maximising the Gain-to-Edit ratio. The two proposed approaches achieved a Delta COMET score of 0.0201 and -0.0108, respectively, leading the first approach to achieve the winning position on the subtask leaderboard.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.13884,
  title  = {Can QE-informed (Re)Translation lead to Error Correction?},
  author = {Govardhan Padmanabhan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.13884},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, WMT25 Shared Task in EMNLP 2025 Conference

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:42:11.508Z