{"paper":{"title":"PaliBench: A Multi-Reference Blueprint for Classical Language Translation Benchmarks","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"PaliBench shows how to build multi-reference benchmarks for classical language translation from existing scholarly translations without treating any one as definitive.","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"M\\'at\\'e Metzger, Nadnapang Phophichit","submitted_at":"2026-05-16T08:43:01Z","abstract_excerpt":"Digital humanities projects increasingly rely on machine translation and large language models to widen access to classical, religious, and otherwise under-translated textual traditions. Yet standard translation benchmarks are poorly suited to such materials: they typically compare a system output against a single reference translation, even though classical texts often support multiple faithful renderings that differ in terminology, register, and interpretation. This article introduces PaliBench, both a benchmark for Pali-to-English translation and a reusable method for constructing multi-ref"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"The broader contribution is methodological: PaliBench shows how existing scholarly translations can be transformed into evaluation infrastructure for interpretive textual traditions without treating any single translation as definitive.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"The assumption that LLM-assisted alignment of independently segmented translations, automated verification, passage-level quality filtering, and deduplication produce a reliable, unbiased multi-reference dataset that faithfully captures interpretive variation across the three human translations.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"PaliBench is a multi-reference benchmark for Pali-to-English translation built from 1,700 aligned passages of the Sutta Pitaka using three scholarly translations to evaluate LLMs with complementary metrics.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"PaliBench shows how to build multi-reference benchmarks for classical language translation from existing scholarly translations without treating any one as 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