A Context-aware Framework for Translation-mediated Conversations

Effective communication is fundamental to any interaction, yet challenges arise when participants do not share a common language. Automatic translation systems offer a powerful solution to bridge language barriers in such scenarios, but they introduce errors that can lead to misunderstandings and conversation breakdown. A key issue is that current systems fail to incorporate the rich contextual information necessary to resolve ambiguities and omitted details, resulting in literal, inappropriate, or misaligned translations. In this work, we present a framework to improve large language model-based translation systems by incorporating contextual information in bilingual conversational settings. During training, we leverage context-augmented parallel data, which allows the model to generate translations sensitive to conversational history. During inference, we perform quality-aware decoding with context-aware metrics to select the optimal translation from a pool of candidates. We validate both components of our framework on two task-oriented domains: customer chat and user-assistant interaction. Across both settings, our framework consistently results in better translations than state-of-the-art systems like GPT-4o and TowerInstruct, as measured by multiple automatic translation quality metrics on several language pairs. We also show that the resulting model leverages context in an intended and interpretable way, improving consistency between the conveyed message and the generated translations.

Analyzing Context Contributions in LLM-based Machine Translation

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in machine translation (MT) and demonstrated the ability to leverage in-context learning through few-shot examples. However, the mechanisms by which LLMs use different parts of the input context remain largely unexplored. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of context utilization in MT, studying how LLMs use various context parts, such as few-shot examples and the source text, when generating translations. We highlight several key findings: (1) the source part of few-shot examples appears to contribute more than its corresponding targets, irrespective of translation direction; (2) finetuning LLMs with parallel data alters the contribution patterns of different context parts; and (3) there is a positional bias where earlier few-shot examples have higher contributions to the translated sequence. Finally, we demonstrate that inspecting anomalous context contributions can potentially uncover pathological translations, such as hallucinations. Our findings shed light on the internal workings of LLM-based MT which go beyond those known for standard encoder-decoder MT models.

Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

The automatic assessment of translation quality has recently become crucial for many stages of the translation pipeline, from data curation to training and decoding. However, while quality estimation metrics have been optimized to align with human judgments, no attention has been given to these metrics' potential biases, particularly in reinforcing visibility and usability for some demographic groups over others. This paper is the first to investigate gender bias in quality estimation (QE) metrics and its downstream impact on machine translation (MT). We focus on out-of-English translations where the target language uses grammatical gender. We ask: (RQ1) Do contemporary QE metrics exhibit gender bias? (RQ2) Can the use of contextual information mitigate this bias? (RQ3) How does QE influence gender bias in MT outputs? Experiments with state-of-the-art QE metrics across multiple domains, datasets, and languages reveal significant bias. Masculine-inflected translations score higher than feminine-inflected ones, and gender-neutral translations are penalized. Moreover, context-aware QE metrics reduce errors for masculine-inflected references but fail to address feminine referents, exacerbating gender disparities. Additionally, we show that QE metrics can perpetuate gender bias in MT systems when used in quality-aware decoding. Our findings highlight the need to address gender bias in QE metrics to ensure equitable and unbiased MT systems.

EmpBot: A T5-based Empathetic Chatbot focusing on Sentiments

In this paper, we introduce EmpBot: an end-to-end empathetic chatbot. Empathetic conversational agents should not only understand what is being discussed, but also acknowledge the implied feelings of the conversation partner and respond appropriately. To this end, we propose a method based on a transformer pretrained language model (T5). Specifically, during finetuning we propose to use three objectives: response language modeling, sentiment understanding, and empathy forcing. The first objective is crucial for generating relevant and coherent responses, while the next ones are significant for acknowledging the sentimental state of the conversational partner and for favoring empathetic responses. We evaluate our model on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset using both automated metrics and human evaluation. The inclusion of the sentiment understanding and empathy forcing auxiliary losses favor empathetic responses, as human evaluation results indicate, comparing with the current state-of-the-art.