In Ordinal Classification tasks, items have to be assigned to classes that have a relative ordering, such as “positive”, “neutral”, “negative” in sentiment analysis. Remarkably, the most popular evaluation metrics for ordinal classification tasks either ignore relevant information (for instance, precision/recall on each of the classes ignores their relative ordering) or assume additional information (for instance, Mean Average Error assumes absolute distances between classes). In this paper we propose a new metric for Ordinal Classification, Closeness Evaluation Measure, that is rooted on Measurement Theory and Information Theory. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results over both synthetic data and data from NLP shared tasks indicate that the proposed metric captures quality aspects from different traditional tasks simultaneously. In addition, it generalizes some popular classification (nominal scale) and error minimization (interval scale) metrics, depending on the measurement scale in which it is instantiated.

We present the IQMT Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation Inside QARLA. IQMT offers a common workbench in which existing evaluation metrics can be utilized and combined. It provides i) a measure to evaluate the quality of any set of similarity metrics (KING), ii) a measure to evaluate the quality of a translation using a set of similarity metrics (QUEEN), and iii) a measure to evaluate the reliability of a test set (JACK). The first release of the IQMT package is freely available for public use. Current version includes a set of 26 metrics from 7 different well-known metric families, and allows the user to supply its own metrics. For future releases, we are working on the design of new metrics that are able to capture linguistic aspects of translation beyond lexical ones.