Is all that Glitters in Machine Translation Quality Estimation really Gold?

Yvette Graham, Timothy Baldwin, Meghan Dowling, Maria Eskevich, Teresa Lynn, Lamia Tounsi


Abstract
Human-targeted metrics provide a compromise between human evaluation of machine translation, where high inter-annotator agreement is difficult to achieve, and fully automatic metrics, such as BLEU or TER, that lack the validity of human assessment. Human-targeted translation edit rate (HTER) is by far the most widely employed human-targeted metric in machine translation, commonly employed, for example, as a gold standard in evaluation of quality estimation. Original experiments justifying the design of HTER, as opposed to other possible formulations, were limited to a small sample of translations and a single language pair, however, and this motivates our re-evaluation of a range of human-targeted metrics on a substantially larger scale. Results show significantly stronger correlation with human judgment for HBLEU over HTER for two of the nine language pairs we include and no significant difference between correlations achieved by HTER and HBLEU for the remaining language pairs. Finally, we evaluate a range of quality estimation systems employing HTER and direct assessment (DA) of translation adequacy as gold labels, resulting in a divergence in system rankings, and propose employment of DA for future quality estimation evaluations.
Anthology ID:
C16-1294
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
3124–3134
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1294
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yvette Graham, Timothy Baldwin, Meghan Dowling, Maria Eskevich, Teresa Lynn, and Lamia Tounsi. 2016. Is all that Glitters in Machine Translation Quality Estimation really Gold?. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 3124–3134, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Is all that Glitters in Machine Translation Quality Estimation really Gold? (Graham et al., COLING 2016)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/C16-1294.pdf