Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhao, Kaiyan, Xie, Zheyong, Miao, Zhongtao, Lyu, Xinze, Hu, Yao, Cao, Shaosheng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Zhao, Kaiyan
Xie, Zheyong
Miao, Zhongtao
Lyu, Xinze
Hu, Yao
Cao, Shaosheng
author_facet Zhao, Kaiyan
Xie, Zheyong
Miao, Zhongtao
Lyu, Xinze
Hu, Yao
Cao, Shaosheng
contents The prevalence of rapidly evolving slang, neologisms, and highly stylized expressions in informal user-generated text, particularly on Chinese social media, poses significant challenges for Machine Translation (MT) benchmarking. Specifically, we identify two primary obstacles: (1) data scarcity, as high-quality parallel data requires bilingual annotators familiar with platform-specific slang, and stylistic cues in both languages; and (2) metric limitations, where traditional evaluators like COMET often fail to capture stylistic fidelity and nonstandard expressions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce CSM-MTBench, a benchmark covering five Chinese-foreign language directions and consisting of two expert-curated subsets: Fun Posts, featuring context-rich, slang- and neologism-heavy content, and Social Snippets, emphasizing concise, emotion- and style- driven expressions. Furthermore, we propose tailored evaluation approaches for each subset: measuring the translation success rate of slang and neologisms in Fun Posts, while assessing tone and style preservation in Social Snippets via a hybrid of embedding-based metrics and LLM-as-a-judge. Experiments on over 20 models reveal substantial variation in how current MT systems handle semantic fidelity and informal, social-media-specific stylistic cues. CSM-MTBench thus serves as a rigorous testbed for advancing MT systems capable of mastering real-world Chinese social media texts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22931
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts
Zhao, Kaiyan
Xie, Zheyong
Miao, Zhongtao
Lyu, Xinze
Hu, Yao
Cao, Shaosheng
Computation and Language
The prevalence of rapidly evolving slang, neologisms, and highly stylized expressions in informal user-generated text, particularly on Chinese social media, poses significant challenges for Machine Translation (MT) benchmarking. Specifically, we identify two primary obstacles: (1) data scarcity, as high-quality parallel data requires bilingual annotators familiar with platform-specific slang, and stylistic cues in both languages; and (2) metric limitations, where traditional evaluators like COMET often fail to capture stylistic fidelity and nonstandard expressions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce CSM-MTBench, a benchmark covering five Chinese-foreign language directions and consisting of two expert-curated subsets: Fun Posts, featuring context-rich, slang- and neologism-heavy content, and Social Snippets, emphasizing concise, emotion- and style- driven expressions. Furthermore, we propose tailored evaluation approaches for each subset: measuring the translation success rate of slang and neologisms in Fun Posts, while assessing tone and style preservation in Social Snippets via a hybrid of embedding-based metrics and LLM-as-a-judge. Experiments on over 20 models reveal substantial variation in how current MT systems handle semantic fidelity and informal, social-media-specific stylistic cues. CSM-MTBench thus serves as a rigorous testbed for advancing MT systems capable of mastering real-world Chinese social media texts.
title Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22931