Papers by José Pombal
A Context-aware Framework for Translation-mediated Conversations (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that bridge language barriers can introduce errors leading to misunderstandings and conversation breakdown. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate contextual information into automatic translation systems . they validate the framework on customer chat and user-assistant interaction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework consistently produces better translations than state-of-the-art systems on two task-oriented domains. |
TOWER+: Bridging Generality and Translation Specialization in Multilingual LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Ricardo Rei, Nuno M Guerreiro, José Pombal, João Alves, Amin Farajian, Pedro Teixeirinha, Andre Martins
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as the de facto solution for multilingual machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a suite of LLMs that can be fine-tuned to deliver strong performance on translation and multilingual general-purpose text capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on translation and general-purpose tasks. |
xTower: A Multilingual LLM for Explaining and Correcting Translation Errors (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Marcos Treviso, Nuno Guerreiro, Sweta Agrawal, Ricardo Rei, José Pombal, Tania Vaz, Helena Wu, Beatriz Silva, Daan Stigt, Andre Martins
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems produce translations with errors and anomalies . understanding these errors can help improve the translation quality and user experience . |
| Approach: | They propose an open large language model (LLM) built on top of TowerBase to provide free-text explanations for translation errors in order to guide the generation of a corrected translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation quality and user experience by allowing translators to provide free-text explanations for errors and anomalies. |
Steering Large Language Models for Machine Translation with Finetuning and In-Context Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Duarte Alves, Nuno Guerreiro, João Alves, José Pombal, Ricardo Rei, José de Souza, Pierre Colombo, Andre Martins
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising avenue for machine translation (MT) however, their effectiveness depends on the choice of few-shot examples and they often require extra post-processing due to overgeneration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates few-shot examples during finetuning to improve performance on MT tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms few-shot prompting while eliminating the need for in-context examples. |