We present a detailed analysis of a graph-based annotation strategy that we employed to annotate a corpus of 11,292 real-world English to Spanish automatic translations with relative (ranking) and absolute (adequate/non-adequate) quality assessments. The proposed approach, inspired by previous work in Interactive Evolutionary Computation and Interactive Genetic Algorithms, results in a simpler and faster annotation process. We empirically compare the method against a traditional, explicit ranking approach, and show that the graph-based strategy: 1) is considerably faster, and 2) produces consistently more reliable annotations.

This paper presents a detailed study of a method for morphology generalization and generation to address out-of-domain translations in English-to-Spanish phrase-based MT. The paper studies whether the morphological richness of the target language causes poor quality translation when translating out-of-domain. In detail, this approach first translates into Spanish simplified forms and then predicts the final inflected forms through a morphology generation step based on shallow and deep-projected linguistic information available from both the source and target-language sentences. Obtained results highlight the importance of generalization, and therefore generation, for dealing with out-of-domain data.

We present a corpus consisting of 11,292 real-world English to Spanish automatic translations annotated with relative (ranking) and absolute (adequate/non-adequate) quality assessments. The translation requests, collected through the popular translation portal http://reverso.net, provide a most variated sample of real-world machine translation (MT) usage, from complete sentences to units of one or two words, from well-formed to hardly intelligible texts, from technical documents to colloquial and slang snippets. In this paper, we present 1) a preliminary annotation experiment that we carried out to select the most appropriate quality criterion to be used for these data, 2) a graph-based methodology inspired by Interactive Genetic Algorithms to reduce the annotation effort, and 3) the outcomes of the full-scale annotation experiment, which result in a valuable and original resource for the analysis and characterization of MT-output quality.