ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics

Chantal Amrhein, Nikita Moghe, Liane Guillou


Abstract
As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of these metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.
Anthology ID:
2022.wmt-1.44
Original:
2022.wmt-1.44v1
Version 2:
2022.wmt-1.44v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
479–513
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.44
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chantal Amrhein, Nikita Moghe, and Liane Guillou. 2022. ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics. In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 479–513, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics (Amrhein et al., WMT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/2022.wmt-1.44.pdf