Abstract
Trainable metrics for machine translation evaluation have been scoring the highest correlations with human judgements in the latest meta-evaluations, outperforming traditional lexical overlap metrics such as BLEU, which is still widely used despite its well-known shortcomings. In this work we look at COMET, a prominent neural evaluation system proposed in 2020, to analyze the extent of its language support restrictions, and to investigate strategies to extend this support to new, under-resourced languages. Our case study focuses on English-Maltese and Spanish-Basque. We run a crowd-based evaluation campaign to collect direct assessments and use the annotated dataset to evaluate COMET-22, further fine-tune it, and to train COMET models from scratch for the two language pairs. Our analysis suggests that COMET’s performance can be improved with fine-tuning, and that COMET can be highly susceptible to the distribution of scores in the training data, which especially impacts low-resource scenarios.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.315
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3553–3565
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.315
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Júlia Falcão, Claudia Borg, Nora Aranberri, and Kurt Abela. 2024. COMET for Low-Resource Machine Translation Evaluation: A Case Study of English-Maltese and Spanish-Basque. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3553–3565, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- COMET for Low-Resource Machine Translation Evaluation: A Case Study of English-Maltese and Spanish-Basque (Falcão et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.315.pdf