A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation
Matthew Snover, Bonnie Dorr, Rich Schwartz, Linnea Micciulla, John Makhoul
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2006.amta-papers.25
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
- Month:
- August 8-12
- Year:
- 2006
- Address:
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Venue:
- AMTA
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
- Note:
- Pages:
- 223–231
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2006.amta-papers.25
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Matthew Snover, Bonnie Dorr, Rich Schwartz, Linnea Micciulla, and John Makhoul. 2006. A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation. In Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers, pages 223–231, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation (Snover et al., AMTA 2006)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2006.amta-papers.25.pdf