Large Language Models for Machine Translation Quality Annotation: Humans and Models Are Both Challenged

arXiv:2610.10918 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-07 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-07

Updated: 2026-10-07

Comments: Accepted at EMNLP 2026

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Machine Translation — 21× in this paper
• Error Span Annotation — 12× in this paper
• Accuracy — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotator Agreement — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• F1 Score — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Alignment — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Multidimensional Quality Metrics — 3× in this paper
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Diagnostic Tools — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Error Localization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Error Taxonomy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Prompt Engineering — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMs
• Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities
• DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report
• xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection
• LLMs as Span Annotators: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Humans
• gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card
• MQM Re-Annotation: A Technique for Collaborative Evaluation of Machine Translation
• Enhancing Human Evaluation in Machine Translation with Comparative Judgment
• Are Large Reasoning Models Good Translation Evaluators? Analysis and Performance Boost

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