Do LLMs Truly Benefit from Longer Context in Automatic Post-Editing?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kim, Ahrii, Kim, Seong-heum
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Kim, Ahrii
Kim, Seong-heum
author_facet Kim, Ahrii
Kim, Seong-heum
contents Automatic post-editing (APE) aims to refine machine translations by correcting residual errors. Although recent large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong translation capabilities, their effectiveness for APE--especially under document-level context--remains insufficiently understood. We present a systematic comparison of proprietary and open-weight LLMs under a naive document-level prompting setup, analyzing APE quality, contextual behavior, robustness, and efficiency. Our results show that proprietary LLMs achieve near human-level APE quality even with simple one-shot prompting, regardless of whether document context is provided. While these models exhibit higher robustness to data poisoning attacks than open-weight counterparts, this robustness also reveals a limitation: they largely fail to exploit document-level context for contextual error correction. Furthermore, standard automatic metrics do not reliably reflect these qualitative improvements, highlighting the continued necessity of human evaluation. Despite their strong performance, the substantial cost and latency overheads of proprietary LLMs render them impractical for real-world APE deployment. Overall, our findings elucidate both the promise and current limitations of LLM-based document-aware APE, and point toward the need for more efficient long-context modeling approaches for translation refinement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19410
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do LLMs Truly Benefit from Longer Context in Automatic Post-Editing?
Kim, Ahrii
Kim, Seong-heum
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Automatic post-editing (APE) aims to refine machine translations by correcting residual errors. Although recent large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong translation capabilities, their effectiveness for APE--especially under document-level context--remains insufficiently understood. We present a systematic comparison of proprietary and open-weight LLMs under a naive document-level prompting setup, analyzing APE quality, contextual behavior, robustness, and efficiency. Our results show that proprietary LLMs achieve near human-level APE quality even with simple one-shot prompting, regardless of whether document context is provided. While these models exhibit higher robustness to data poisoning attacks than open-weight counterparts, this robustness also reveals a limitation: they largely fail to exploit document-level context for contextual error correction. Furthermore, standard automatic metrics do not reliably reflect these qualitative improvements, highlighting the continued necessity of human evaluation. Despite their strong performance, the substantial cost and latency overheads of proprietary LLMs render them impractical for real-world APE deployment. Overall, our findings elucidate both the promise and current limitations of LLM-based document-aware APE, and point toward the need for more efficient long-context modeling approaches for translation refinement.
title Do LLMs Truly Benefit from Longer Context in Automatic Post-Editing?
topic Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19410