Dynamic Meta-Metrics: Source-Sentence Conditioned Weighting for MT Evaluation

Luke Zhang, Justin Vasselli, Aditya Khan, York Hay Ng, En-Shiun Annie Lee


Abstract
We propose Dynamic Meta-Metrics (DMM), a framework for machine translation evaluation that learns source-sentence conditioned combinations of existing metrics. Rather than relying on a single static ensemble or language-specific weighting, DMM adapts the metric combination based on properties of the source segment. We study hard conditioning, which fits an interpretable combiner per cluster, and an exploratory soft-conditioned extension whose weights vary continuously with source-cluster responsibilities. We evaluate DMM on the WMT Metrics Shared Task data across multiple language pairs using pairwise agreement measures at the system and segment levels. Across settings, MLP-based combinations outperform linear and Gaussian process-based ensembles, and introducing soft conditioning yields gains over linear models.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-srw.80
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Santosh T.Y.S.S., Juan Diego Rodriguez, Ona de Gibert
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
903–912
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.80/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luke Zhang, Justin Vasselli, Aditya Khan, York Hay Ng, and En-Shiun Annie Lee. 2026. Dynamic Meta-Metrics: Source-Sentence Conditioned Weighting for MT Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 903–912, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dynamic Meta-Metrics: Source-Sentence Conditioned Weighting for MT Evaluation (Zhang et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.80.pdf