SALT at SemEval-2025 Task 2: A SQL-based Approach for LLM-Free Entity-Aware-Translation
T. Völker, J. Pfister, and A. Hotho. Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), page 852--864. Vienna, Austria, Association for Computational Linguistics, (July 2025)
Abstract
Entity-aware machine translation faces significant challenges when translating culturally-adapted named entities that require knowledge beyond the source text.We present SALT (SQL-based Approach for LLM-Free Entity-Aware-Translation), a parameter-efficient system for the SemEval-2025 Task 2.Our approach combines SQL-based entity retrieval with constrained neural translation via logit biasing and explicit entity annotations.Despite its simplicity, it achieves state-of-the-art performance (First Place) among approaches not using gold-standard data, while requiring far less computation than LLM-based methods.Our ablation studies show simple SQL-based retrieval rivals complex neural models, and strategic model refinement outperforms increased model complexity.SALT offers an alternative to resource-intensive LLM-based approaches, achieving comparable results with only a fraction of the parameters.
%0 Conference Paper
%1 volker-etal-2025-salt
%A Völker, Tom
%A Pfister, Jan
%A Hotho, Andreas
%B Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
%C Vienna, Austria
%D 2025
%E Rosenthal, Sara
%E Rosá, Aiala
%E Ghosh, Debanjan
%E Zampieri, Marcos
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%K nlp myown author:völker author:hotho from:janpf author:pfister
%P 852--864
%T SALT at SemEval-2025 Task 2: A SQL-based Approach for LLM-Free Entity-Aware-Translation
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.semeval-1.117/
%X Entity-aware machine translation faces significant challenges when translating culturally-adapted named entities that require knowledge beyond the source text.We present SALT (SQL-based Approach for LLM-Free Entity-Aware-Translation), a parameter-efficient system for the SemEval-2025 Task 2.Our approach combines SQL-based entity retrieval with constrained neural translation via logit biasing and explicit entity annotations.Despite its simplicity, it achieves state-of-the-art performance (First Place) among approaches not using gold-standard data, while requiring far less computation than LLM-based methods.Our ablation studies show simple SQL-based retrieval rivals complex neural models, and strategic model refinement outperforms increased model complexity.SALT offers an alternative to resource-intensive LLM-based approaches, achieving comparable results with only a fraction of the parameters.
%@ 979-8-89176-273-2
@inproceedings{volker-etal-2025-salt,
abstract = {Entity-aware machine translation faces significant challenges when translating culturally-adapted named entities that require knowledge beyond the source text.We present SALT (SQL-based Approach for LLM-Free Entity-Aware-Translation), a parameter-efficient system for the SemEval-2025 Task 2.Our approach combines SQL-based entity retrieval with constrained neural translation via logit biasing and explicit entity annotations.Despite its simplicity, it achieves state-of-the-art performance (First Place) among approaches not using gold-standard data, while requiring far less computation than LLM-based methods.Our ablation studies show simple SQL-based retrieval rivals complex neural models, and strategic model refinement outperforms increased model complexity.SALT offers an alternative to resource-intensive LLM-based approaches, achieving comparable results with only a fraction of the parameters.},
added-at = {2025-08-08T13:16:11.000+0200},
address = {Vienna, Austria},
author = {Völker, Tom and Pfister, Jan and Hotho, Andreas},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2affd8bf271f7304726fcdc6b1f5211d6/dmir},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)},
editor = {Rosenthal, Sara and Ros{\'a}, Aiala and Ghosh, Debanjan and Zampieri, Marcos},
interhash = {dc9d89cec0ca0bdc552ab64371c86d63},
intrahash = {affd8bf271f7304726fcdc6b1f5211d6},
isbn = {979-8-89176-273-2},
keywords = {nlp myown author:völker author:hotho from:janpf author:pfister},
month = jul,
pages = {852--864},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
timestamp = {2025-08-08T13:16:11.000+0200},
title = {{SALT} at {S}em{E}val-2025 Task 2: A {SQL}-based Approach for {LLM}-Free Entity-Aware-Translation},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.semeval-1.117/},
year = 2025
}