Niloufar Salehi


2022

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Quality Estimation via Backtranslation at the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation Task
Sweta Agrawal | Nikita Mehandru | Niloufar Salehi | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper describes submission to the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation shared task (Task 1: sentence-level quality prediction). We follow a simple and intuitive approach, which consists of estimating MT quality by automatically back-translating hypotheses into the source language using a multilingual MT system. We then compare the resulting backtranslation with the original source using standard MT evaluation metrics. We find that even the best-performing backtranslation-based scores perform substantially worse than supervised QE systems, including the organizers’ baseline. However, combining backtranslation-based metrics with off-the-shelf QE scorers improves correlation with human judgments, suggesting that they can indeed complement a supervised QE system.