@inproceedings{snover-etal-2006-study,
    title = "A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation",
    author = "Snover, Matthew  and
      Dorr, Bonnie  and
      Schwartz, Rich  and
      Micciulla, Linnea  and
      Makhoul, John",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers",
    month = aug # " 8-12",
    year = "2006",
    address = "Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Machine Translation in the Americas",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2006.amta-papers.25/",
    pages = "223--231",
    abstract = "We examine a new, intuitive measure for evaluating machine-translation output that avoids the knowledge intensiveness of more meaning-based approaches, and the labor-intensiveness of human judgments. Translation Edit Rate (TER) measures the amount of editing that a human would have to perform to change a system output so it exactly matches a reference translation. We show that the single-reference variant of TER correlates as well with human judgments of MT quality as the four-reference variant of BLEU. We also define a human-targeted TER (or HTER) and show that it yields higher correlations with human judgments than BLEU{---}even when BLEU is given human-targeted references. Our results indicate that HTER correlates with human judgments better than HMETEOR and that the four-reference variants of TER and HTER correlate with human judgments as well as{---}or better than{---}a second human judgment does."
}