Discovering Translation-Worthy Languages with E-Values
Wajdi Ben Saad, Safa Madiouni
Abstract
Choosing when to translate multilingual documents is a central routing problem in text classification: translation can improve predictions for some languages while degrading others or adding unnecessary computation. Uniform translation and heuristic language tiers do not provide statistically controlled route selection. We introduce a language-level router based on paired e-processes that continuously compares direct and translation-assisted classification before freezing a routing policy. A familywise-controlled threshold of 280 bounds the probability of any false route across 14 eligible languages per dataset by 0.05. On SIB-200 and MASSIVE, the router selects translation for 4 of 15 languages and 14 of 15 locales, improving held-out accuracy over direct classification by 8.14 and 16.70 percentage points, respectively. All 28 decisions remain stable across 50 outcome-independent orderings and relative to the per-group threshold. Our results demonstrate that paired e-processes enable statistically controlled, anytime-valid, and auditable multilingual classification routing.