Nitika Mathur


2023

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Results of WMT23 Metrics Shared Task: Metrics Might Be Guilty but References Are Not Innocent
Markus Freitag | Nitika Mathur | Chi-kiu Lo | Eleftherios Avramidis | Ricardo Rei | Brian Thompson | Tom Kocmi | Frederic Blain | Daniel Deutsch | Craig Stewart | Chrysoula Zerva | Sheila Castilho | Alon Lavie | George Foster
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents the results of the WMT23 Metrics Shared Task. Participants submitting automatic MT evaluation metrics were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT23 News Translation Task. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate with human ratings at the system and segment level. Similar to last year, we acquired our own human ratings based on expert-based human evaluation via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). Following last year’s success, we also included a challenge set subtask, where participants had to create contrastive test suites for evaluating metrics’ ability to capture and penalise specific types of translation errors. Furthermore, we improved our meta-evaluation procedure by considering fewer tasks and calculating a global score by weighted averaging across the various tasks. We present an extensive analysis on how well metrics perform on three language pairs: Chinese-English, Hebrew-English on the sentence-level and English-German on the paragraph-level. The results strongly confirm the results reported last year, that neural-based metrics are significantly better than non-neural metrics in their levels of correlation with human judgments. Further, we investigate the impact of bad reference translations on the correlations of metrics with human judgment. We present a novel approach for generating synthetic reference translations based on the collection of MT system outputs and their corresponding MQM ratings, which has the potential to mitigate bad reference issues we observed this year for some language pairs. Finally, we also study the connections between the magnitude of metric differences and their expected significance in human evaluation, which should help the community to better understand and adopt new metrics.

2022

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Results of WMT22 Metrics Shared Task: Stop Using BLEU – Neural Metrics Are Better and More Robust
Markus Freitag | Ricardo Rei | Nitika Mathur | Chi-kiu Lo | Craig Stewart | Eleftherios Avramidis | Tom Kocmi | George Foster | Alon Lavie | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper presents the results of the WMT22 Metrics Shared Task. Participants submitting automatic MT evaluation metrics were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT22 News Translation Task on four different domains: news, social, ecommerce, and chat. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate with human ratings at the system and segment level. Similar to last year, we acquired our own human ratings based on expert-based human evaluation via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). This setup had several advantages, among other things: (i) expert-based evaluation is more reliable, (ii) we extended the pool of translations by 5 additional translations based on MBR decoding or rescoring which are challenging for current metrics. In addition, we initiated a challenge set subtask, where participants had to create contrastive test suites for evaluating metrics’ ability to capture and penalise specific types of translation errors. Finally, we present an extensive analysis on how well metrics perform on three language pairs: English to German, English to Russian and Chinese to English. The results demonstrate the superiority of neural-based learned metrics and demonstrate again that overlap metrics like Bleu, spBleu or chrf correlate poorly with human ratings. The results also reveal that neural-based metrics are remarkably robust across different domains and challenges.

2021

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Results of the WMT21 Metrics Shared Task: Evaluating Metrics with Expert-based Human Evaluations on TED and News Domain
Markus Freitag | Ricardo Rei | Nitika Mathur | Chi-kiu Lo | Craig Stewart | George Foster | Alon Lavie | Ondřej Bojar
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents the results of the WMT21 Metrics Shared Task. Participants were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT21 News Translation Task with automatic metrics on two different domains: news and TED talks. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate at the system- and segment-level with human ratings. Contrary to previous years’ editions, this year we acquired our own human ratings based on expert-based human evaluation via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). This setup had several advantages: (i) expert-based evaluation has been shown to be more reliable, (ii) we were able to evaluate all metrics on two different domains using translations of the same MT systems, (iii) we added 5 additional translations coming from the same system during system development. In addition, we designed three challenge sets that evaluate the robustness of all automatic metrics. We present an extensive analysis on how well metrics perform on three language pairs: English to German, English to Russian and Chinese to English. We further show the impact of different reference translations on reference-based metrics and compare our expert-based MQM annotation with the DA scores acquired by WMT.

2020

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Tangled up in BLEU: Reevaluating the Evaluation of Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics
Nitika Mathur | Timothy Baldwin | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Automatic metrics are fundamental for the development and evaluation of machine translation systems. Judging whether, and to what extent, automatic metrics concur with the gold standard of human evaluation is not a straightforward problem. We show that current methods for judging metrics are highly sensitive to the translations used for assessment, particularly the presence of outliers, which often leads to falsely confident conclusions about a metric’s efficacy. Finally, we turn to pairwise system ranking, developing a method for thresholding performance improvement under an automatic metric against human judgements, which allows quantification of type I versus type II errors incurred, i.e., insignificant human differences in system quality that are accepted, and significant human differences that are rejected. Together, these findings suggest improvements to the protocols for metric evaluation and system performance evaluation in machine translation.

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Results of the WMT20 Metrics Shared Task
Nitika Mathur | Johnny Wei | Markus Freitag | Qingsong Ma | Ondřej Bojar
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper presents the results of the WMT20 Metrics Shared Task. Participants were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT20 News Translation Task with automatic metrics. Ten research groups submitted 27 metrics, four of which are reference-less “metrics”. In addition, we computed five baseline metrics, including sentBLEU, BLEU, TER and using the SacreBLEU scorer. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate at the system-, document- and segment-level with the WMT20 official human scores. We present an extensive analysis on influence of different reference translations on metric reliability, how well automatic metrics score human translations, and we also flag major discrepancies between metric and human scores when evaluating MT systems. Finally, we investigate whether we can use automatic metrics to flag incorrect human ratings.

2019

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Putting Evaluation in Context: Contextual Embeddings Improve Machine Translation Evaluation
Nitika Mathur | Timothy Baldwin | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Accurate, automatic evaluation of machine translation is critical for system tuning, and evaluating progress in the field. We proposed a simple unsupervised metric, and additional supervised metrics which rely on contextual word embeddings to encode the translation and reference sentences. We find that these models rival or surpass all existing metrics in the WMT 2017 sentence-level and system-level tracks, and our trained model has a substantially higher correlation with human judgements than all existing metrics on the WMT 2017 to-English sentence level dataset.

2018

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Towards Efficient Machine Translation Evaluation by Modelling Annotators
Nitika Mathur | Timothy Baldwin | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2018

Accurate evaluation of translation has long been a difficult, yet important problem. Current evaluations use direct assessment (DA), based on crowd sourcing judgements from a large pool of workers, along with quality control checks, and a robust method for combining redundant judgements. In this paper we show that the quality control mechanism is overly conservative, which increases the time and expense of the evaluation. We propose a model that does not rely on a pre-processing step to filter workers and takes into account varying annotator reliabilities. Our model effectively weights each worker's scores based on the inferred precision of the worker, and is much more reliable than the mean of either the raw scores or the standardised scores. We also show that DA does not deliver on the promise of longitudinal evaluation, and propose redesigning the structure of the annotation tasks that can solve this problem.

2017

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Sequence Effects in Crowdsourced Annotations
Nitika Mathur | Timothy Baldwin | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Manual data annotation is a vital component of NLP research. When designing annotation tasks, properties of the annotation interface can unintentionally lead to artefacts in the resulting dataset, biasing the evaluation. In this paper, we explore sequence effects where annotations of an item are affected by the preceding items. Having assigned one label to an instance, the annotator may be less (or more) likely to assign the same label to the next. During rating tasks, seeing a low quality item may affect the score given to the next item either positively or negatively. We see clear evidence of both types of effects using auto-correlation studies over three different crowdsourced datasets. We then recommend a simple way to minimise sequence effects.

2015

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The Impact of Multiword Expression Compositionality on Machine Translation Evaluation
Bahar Salehi | Nitika Mathur | Paul Cook | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Multiword Expressions

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Accurate Evaluation of Segment-level Machine Translation Metrics
Yvette Graham | Timothy Baldwin | Nitika Mathur
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2014

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Randomized Significance Tests in Machine Translation
Yvette Graham | Nitika Mathur | Timothy Baldwin
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation