# Beyond the Sentence: A Survey on Context-Aware Machine Translation with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07583/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Preference Optimization: Pushing the Boundaries of LLM Performance in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08417/) (2024)
- [How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09210/) (2023)
- [Experts, Errors, and Context: A Large-Scale Study of Human Evaluation for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14478/) (2021)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08177/) (2023)
- [Prompting Large Language Model for Machine Translation: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07069/) (2023)
- [Understanding Neural Networks through Representation Erasure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08220/) (2016)
- [Tower: An Open Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17733/) (2024)
- [Is MAP Decoding All You Need? The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10283/) (2020)
- [High Quality Rather than High Model Probability: Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Neural Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09388/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation Learns Anaphora Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10163/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation with Extended Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05943/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Discourse Phenomena in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00513/) (2017)
- [Large language models effectively leverage document-level context for literary translation, but critical errors persist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03245/) (2023)
- [Improving the Transformer Translation Model with Document-Level Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03581/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the popularity of the large language models (LLMs), their application to machine translation is relatively underexplored, especially in context-aware settings. This work presents a literature review of context-aware translation with LLMs. The existing works utilise prompting and fine-tuning approaches, with few focusing on automatic post-editing and creating translation agents for context-aware machine translation. We observed that the commercial LLMs (such as ChatGPT and Tower LLM) achieved better results than the open-source LLMs (such as Llama and Bloom LLMs), and prompt-based approaches serve as good baselines to assess the quality of translations. Finally, we present some interesting future directions to explore.