Discourse Dependency: A Continuous Criterion for Translation Difficulty
Recent calls for harder machine translation benchmarks have not clarified what difficulty should mean. We argue that one meaningful and currently unmeasured axis is referential reach, the distance a segment must look back into its document to resolve the entities and pronouns it contains. We formalize this as discourse dependency (DDP), a metric-free, source-side measure computed from named entity re-mentions and pronominal coreference. Validated against gold coreference, DDP errs one-sidedly in 99.2% of segments, so a high-DDP segment is certified to require long-range context. Applying DDP to WMT24++ and WMT25 shows that both are heavily skewed toward low-DDP segments, which domain labe...
| Authors | Ahrii Kim, Chanjun Park, Seong-heum Kim |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 September 2026 |
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