Quantitative evaluation of machine translation using two-way MT
Shoichi Yokoyama, Akira Kumano, Masaki Matsudaira, Yoshiko Shirokizawa, Mutsumi Kawagoe, Shuji Kodama, Hideki Kashioka, Terumasa Ehara, Shinichiro Miyazawa, Yasuo Nakajima
Abstract
One of the most important issues in the field of machine translation is evaluation of the translated sentences. This paper proposes a quantitative method of evaluation for machine translation systems. The method is as follows. First, an example sentence in Japanese is machine translated into English using several Japanese-English machine translation systems. Second, the output English sentences are machine translated into Japanese using several English-Japanese machine translation systems (different from the Japanese-English machine translation systems). Then, each output Japanese sentence is compared with the original Japanese sentence in terms of word identification, correctness of the modification, syntactic dependency, and parataxes. An average score is calculated, and this becomes the total evaluation of the machine translation of the sentence. From this two-way machine translation and the calculation of the score, we can quantitatively evaluate the English machine translation. For the present study, we selected 100 Japanese sentences from the abstracts of scientific articles. Each of these sentences has an English translation which was performed by a human. Approximately half of these sentences are evaluated and the results are given. In addition, a comparison of human and machine translations is also performed and the trade-off between the two methods of translation is discussed.- Anthology ID:
- 1999.mtsummit-1.84
- Volume:
- Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VII
- Month:
- September 13-17
- Year:
- 1999
- Address:
- Singapore, Singapore
- Venue:
- MTSummit
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Note:
- Pages:
- 568–573
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/1999.mtsummit-1.84
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Shoichi Yokoyama, Akira Kumano, Masaki Matsudaira, Yoshiko Shirokizawa, Mutsumi Kawagoe, Shuji Kodama, Hideki Kashioka, Terumasa Ehara, Shinichiro Miyazawa, and Yasuo Nakajima. 1999. Quantitative evaluation of machine translation using two-way MT. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VII, pages 568–573, Singapore, Singapore.
- Cite (Informal):
- Quantitative evaluation of machine translation using two-way MT (Yokoyama et al., MTSummit 1999)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/1999.mtsummit-1.84.pdf