2025.emnlp-main.1081@ACL

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#1 EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translation [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Sen Yang, Yu Bao, Yu Lu, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang, Shanbo Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong machine translation capabilities for English-centric language pairs but underperform in direct non-English (x2x) translation. This work addresses this limitation through a synthetic data generation framework that leverages models’ established English-to-x (en2x) capabilities. By extending English parallel corpora into omnidirectional datasets and developing an English-referenced quality evaluation proxy, we enable effective collection of high-quality x2x training data. Combined with preference-based optimization, our method achieves significant improvement across 72 x2x directions for widely used LLMs, while generalizing to enhance en2x performance. The results demonstrate that strategic exploitation of English-centric strengths can bootstrap comprehensive multilingual translation capabilities in LLMs.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Main