Measuring lexical distance between parallel corpora: the case of AI-generated news translation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the University of Warwick’s news translation project in the mid-2000s, it has been a truism that journalists rarely translate whole articles but instead compose stories using texts in other languages as one source among others. However, the development of AI-based machine translation has brought about a shift in journalistic practices. Increasingly, multilingual news agencies are using these tools to produce similar stories in multiple languages. One consequence has been that researchers can now compile parallel corpora of translated stories. This article proposes a method to characterize such corpora by measuring the distance between source and target texts, a method it applies to stories published in English and French on the website SwissInfo.ch. It describes the mechanics of corpus-building, article vectorization, and the creation of a lexical substitution list that makes measurement possible. It then proposes three measures – Euclidean, Jaccard, and cosine – which have complementary strengths and weaknesses. The value of these measurement tools is heuristic: they make it possible to identify patterns that can be investigated using other methods more familiar to news translation researchers, such as interviews or direct observation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it