SalamandraTA at WMT 2026 Terminology Shared Task: Hard Examples Are Better Teachers

Abstract:Terminology-aware translation asks for more than a correct translation: the output must use the exact terms a glossary prescribes. The standard recipe, fine-tuning on glossary-annotated translation pairs, hides an inefficiency: for most examples the glossary prescribes exactly what the model would have produced anyway, so they teach nothing about following a glossary. We therefore keep only the examples where the model's own translation contradicts the glossary. In a controlled study at fixed data volume, this selection alone raises term accuracy from 78.7% to 89.9%. The filtered data, built by a two-way synthetic pipeline on open models, is part of the instruction-tuning mixture of our public release SalamandraTA-7b-instruct v3.0, which, used exactly as released and wrapped in a document-level inference pipeline, forms the BSC submission to the WMT26 Terminology Shared Task Track 1. At the official WMT26 evaluation, our system achieves 94.2% term success at 74.6 chrF++, with only two of the twenty-two submissions outperforming it on both metrics. On last year's benchmark, it also surpasses our GRPO-based system, despite being trained solely with ordinary supervised fine-tuning.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.09999 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.09999v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09999 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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