Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

Current state-of-the-art Quality Estimation (QE) in machine translation relies on massive, proprietary LLMs, raising data privacy concerns. We demonstrate that smaller, open-source LLMs (<30B parameters) are a viable, cost-effective and privacy-preserving alternative. Using a single-pass prompting strategy, our models simultaneously generate quality scores, MQM error annotations, suggested error corrections, and full post-editions. Our analysis shows these models achieve highly competitive system-level correlations with human judgments that outperform traditional neural metrics, fine-tuned models, and human inter-annotator agreement, effectively approximating the capabilities of much larger proprietary LLMs.

Indic quality estimation (QE) and automatic post-editing (APE) data is spread across separate releases, so no single resource supports training and evaluation across tasks and language pairs on one footing. We consolidate the WMT 2020-2024 shared-task lineage with an extended English-Malayalam resource into IndicQE-APE: $126{,}754$ instances over nine directional pairs, with up to four label types aligned on the same segment, a direct assessment, a human post-edit, word-level tags and an error explanation, and a test set stratified over four difficulty axes. We benchmark six prompted LLMs and three COMET metrics on segment-level QE, and three systems on APE. Two of the axes are defined partly on direct assessment and select a compressed slice of it. Segments whose segment-level and token-level signals disagree are ranked below equally scored segments of the same language. Four-shot prompting costs every model at or below $3.4$B both correlation and output-format compliance. Unedited MT beats every APE system we run on three of the four pairs. The benchmark (https://huggingface.co/datasets/surrey-nlp/IndicQE-APE) and code (https://github.com/surrey-nlp/IndicQE-APE) are released.

Post-Editing (PE) of Machine Translation (MT) output often involves repeating the same lexical and terminological corrections across many segments, especially in specialised and highly repetitive documents. Despite substantial work on Automatic Post-Editing (APE), most available corpora operate at the sentence level, others are synthetic, and overall not designed to study how corrections propagate in realistic Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) workflows. This paper presents the APEX-VW (Automatic Post-Editing eXperiments on Virtual Wards) Corpus, a new open English-Spanish (EN-ES) dataset built from recent NHS virtual-ward documents and professional PE in Trados Studio, with controlled MT, terminology, and quality assurance settings. The corpus contains seven document-coherent source texts totalling 42k words, translated with four MT systems representing different paradigms and then post-edited by professional translators. Unlike prior resources such as WMT APE corpora, eSCAPE, MLQE-PE, or LangMark, the dataset preserves document order and CAT-tool context, making it suitable for research on terminology normalisation, correction propagation, and human-in-the-loop translation support. The paper describes the corpus design, data preparation, PE setup, and initial corpus statistics, and positions the resource as a benchmark for document-level APE and propagation-aware assistive tools.