Simul-COMET: A Quality Metric for Simultaneous Interpretation in Distant Language Pair Considering Word Order Difference

Kosuke Doi, Mana Makinae, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe


Abstract
In simultaneous interpretation (SI), interpreters perform real-time translation by segmenting the source speech into chunks and translating them in the order they appear.Since surface-matching metrics such as BLEU correlate poorly with human evaluations, translation quality is often evaluated using neural metrics that measure semantic similarity, such as COMET.However, while SI translation ideally exhibits high monotonicity, COMET tends to assign higher scores to offline translations with long-distance reordering, because it is trained on such offline translation data.To address this gap, we propose Simul-COMET, a variation of COMET adapted for SI evaluation specifically designed for monotonicity.We train Simul-COMET on the SI-style translation data, which was converted from the offline translation of the COMET training data by leveraging large language models.In English–Japanese translation experiments, we demonstrate that Simul-COMET assigns higher scores to SI-style translations than to offline ones.Moreover, Simul-COMET shows stronger alignment with evaluation scores provided by professional interpreters than the original COMET.Simul-COMET is available at https://github.com/kosuked/simul-comet.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.2110
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
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San Diego, California, United States
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Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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Findings
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Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
42515–42533
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2110/
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Cite (ACL):
Kosuke Doi, Mana Makinae, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, and Taro Watanabe. 2026. Simul-COMET: A Quality Metric for Simultaneous Interpretation in Distant Language Pair Considering Word Order Difference. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 42515–42533, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Simul-COMET: A Quality Metric for Simultaneous Interpretation in Distant Language Pair Considering Word Order Difference (Doi et al., Findings 2026)
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