Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Translation Error Detection:An English--Greek Contrastive Study
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.28776 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 Aug 2026]
Title:Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Translation Error Detection:An English--Greek Contrastive Study
Authors:Eleftherios Kalogeros, Athanasios Ntalakas, Manolis Gergatsoulis, Paschalis Nikolaou, Sotiria-Lito Alexaki
View a PDF of the paper titled Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Translation Error Detection:An English--Greek Contrastive Study, by Eleftherios Kalogeros and 4 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Multilingual sentence embeddings are increasingly used to estimate semantic similarity across languages, yet their sensitivity to fine-grained translation errors remains insufficiently understood. This study investigates whether general-purpose multilingual embedding models can distinguish correct English-Greek translations from minimally modified erroneous alternatives. A contrastive dataset was developed from FLORES+ sentence-aligned reference translations and reviewed by two translation experts. It contains 1,850 examples across ten core and five exploratory error categories, covering factual, lexical-semantic, grammatical, relational, referential, and discourse-level phenomena.
Five multilingual sentence-embedding models (BGE-M3, Multilingual E5, Multilingual MPNet, LaBSE, and Jina Embeddings v3) were evaluated using cosine similarity between each English source sentence and its correct and erroneous Greek translations. A reference-free COMETKiwi model was also evaluated as an MT quality-estimation baseline. Performance was assessed through contrastive accuracy and score margins for category-specific sensitivity. BGE-M3 achieved the highest accuracy among embedding models at 89.30 percent, while COMETKiwi achieved 94.49 percent. Embedding models detected explicit factual and lexical changes more reliably than tense-and-aspect and pronoun-coreference errors. COMETKiwi improved performance on several difficult categories, including tense and aspect, pronoun and coreference, and semantic-role errors, but showed lower sensitivity to date-and-time errors and underperformed the embedding models on numbers. The results show complementary error-sensitivity profiles: multilingual sentence embeddings provide useful semantic adequacy signals but are better suited as components of broader translation-evaluation frameworks than as standalone metrics.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.28776 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.28776v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28776
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
|
Submission history
From: Manolis Gergatsoulis [view email][v1] Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:32:54 UTC (33 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Translation Error Detection:An English--Greek Contrastive Study, by Eleftherios Kalogeros and 4 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
Recognition, Simulation, and Refusal: A Contamination-Aware Study of Classic Psychological Effects in LLM Agents
Sep 22
-
Memory That Looks Forward: A Zero-Inference Prospective Term for Personal Memory Retrieval
Sep 22
-
Summarize, Judge, Refine: Decoupled Content Understanding and Policy Learning for Multimodal Content Moderation
Sep 22
-
AI-inferred expressed well-being and collective-action discourse in climate-change campaigns on X
Sep 22
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.