Challenge: Several recent papers claim to have achieved human parity at sentence-level machine translation.
Approach: They propose to use a dataset with rich discourse annotations to evaluate MT performance . they find that MT outputs differ fundamentally from human translations in terms of latent discourse structures.
Outcome: The proposed dataset builds upon the large-scale parallel corpus BWB . it covers 15,095 entity mentions in both languages and compares them to human translations .

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Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Literary translation is a culturally significant task, but it is bottlenecked by the small number of qualified literary translators . a dataset of non-English language novels is used to study literary MT .
Approach: They use a dataset of non-English language novels aligned to human and automatic English translations to study literary MT.
Outcome: The proposed model prefers human translations over machine translations at a rate of 84% . state-of-the-art MT metrics do not correlate with preferences, the study finds .
Document-Level Machine Translation with Large-Scale Public Parallel Corpora (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Document-level machine translation has inherent advantages over sentence-level translation due to additional information available to a model from document context.
Approach: They propose to use document context to train context-aware models on these datasets and to use it to model document-level phenomena.
Outcome: The proposed models improve translation quality and target document-level phenomena by incorporating contextual information from several preceding sentences.
Has Machine Translation Achieved Human Parity? A Case for Document-level Evaluation (D18-1)

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Challenge: Recent research suggests that neural machine translation achieves parity with professional human translation on the WMT Chinese–English news translation task.
Approach: They empirically test neural machine translation on a Chinese–English news translation task . they show human raters prefer human over machine translation when evaluating documents .
Outcome: The proposed method shows that human translators prefer document-level evaluation over machine translation . the results highlight the need to shift towards document- level evaluation as machine translation improves .
Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can produce coherent, cohesive, relevant, and fluent answers for various natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They examine the impact of different prompts on document-level translation quality and discourse phenomena using figures and lines, which are invisible to GPT-4.
Outcome: The proposed models outperform commercial MT systems and advanced document-level MT methods on a number of benchmarks and show potential to become a new paradigm for document- level translation.
On Context Span Needed for Machine Translation Evaluation (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: a number of common patterns can be observed for context-aware MT evaluation, authors say . document-level evaluations have largely been performed at the sentence level . the definition of what constitutes a "document level" evaluation is still unclear .
Approach: They propose to use a series of surveys to identify the necessary context span . they find common patterns that can be used to draw general guidelines .
Outcome: The proposed evaluations of machine translation systems show that some issues and spans depend on domain and target language.
Leveraging Discourse Rewards for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Document-level machine translation models are often not trained to explicitly ensure discourse quality.
Approach: They propose a method that explicitly optimizes lexical cohesion and coherence metrics by using a reinforcement learning objective.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves document translations over four different languages and three translation domains while maintaining faithfulness to the reference translation.
BlonDe: An Automatic Evaluation Metric for Document-level Machine Translation (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Standard evaluation metrics, e.g., BLEU, TER and METEOR, focus on the quality of translations at the sentence level and do not consider discourse-level features.
Approach: They propose to use a metric to take discourse coherence into consideration by categorizing discourse-related spans and calculating the similarity-based F1 measure of categorized spans.
Outcome: The proposed metric possesses better selectivity and interpretability at the document-level, and is more sensitive to document- level nuances.
Hierarchical Modeling of Global Context for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)

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Challenge: Document-level machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to the difficulty in efficiently using document context.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical model to learn document context for document-level neural machine translation . they use a sentence encoder to capture intra-sentence dependencies and a document encoder .
Outcome: The proposed model significantly improves document-level translation performance over strong baselines.
Has Machine Translation Evaluation Achieved Human Parity? The Human Reference and the Limits of Progress (2025.acl-short)

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Challenge: In machine translation evaluation, metric performance is assessed based on agreement with human judgments.
Approach: They incorporate human baselines into the MT meta-evaluation to gain a clearer understanding of metric performance and establish an upper bound.
Outcome: The results suggest human parity, but there are several reasons to caution .
How Good Are LLMs for Literary Translation, Really? Literary Translation Evaluation with Humans and LLMs (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent research has focused on literary machine translation (MT) but evaluation of literary MT remains an open problem.
Approach: They propose a paragraph-level parallel corpus containing verified human translations and 13k evaluated sentences across four language pairs.
Outcome: The proposed corpus compares human evaluations with students and professionals . it shows that the adequacy of human evaluation is controlled by two factors .

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