Achieving accurate conclusions in evaluation of automatic machine translation metrics

Automatic Machine Translation metrics, such as BLEU, are widely used in empirical evaluation as a substitute for human assessment. Subsequently, the performance of a given metric is measured by its strength of correlation with human judgment. When a newly proposed metric achieves a stronger correlation over that of a baseline, it is important to take into account the uncertainty inherent in correlation point estimates prior to concluding improvements in metric performance. Confidence intervals for correlations with human judgment are rarely reported in metric evaluations, however, and when they have been reported, the most suitable methods have unfortunately not been applied. For example, incorrect assumptions about correlation sampling distributions made in past evaluations risk over-estimation of significant differences in metric performance. In this paper, we provide analysis of each of the issues that may lead to inaccuracies before providing detail of a method that overcomes previous challenges. Additionally, we propose a new method of translation sampling that in contrast achieves\ud genuine high conclusivity in evaluation of the relative performance of metrics

Results of the WMT19 metrics shared task: segment-level and strong MT systems pose big challenges

This paper presents the results of the WMT19 Metrics Shared Task. Participants were asked to score the outputs of the translations systems competing in the WMT19 News Translation Task with automatic metrics. 13 research groups submitted 24 metrics, 10 of which are reference-less "metrics" and constitute submissions to the joint task with WMT19 Quality Estimation Task, "QE as a Metric". In addition, we computed 11 baseline metrics, with 8 commonly applied baselines (BLEU, SentBLEU, NIST, WER, PER, TER, CDER, and chrF) and 3 reimplementations (chrF+, sacreBLEU-BLEU, and sacreBLEU-chrF). Metrics were evaluated on the system level, how well a given metric correlates with the WMT19 official manual ranking, and segment level, how well the metric correlates with human judgements of segment quality. This year, we use direct assessment (DA) as our only form of manual evaluation

Comparative evaluation of research vs. Online MT systems

This paper reports MT evaluation experiments that were conducted at the end of year 1 of the EU-funded CoSyne 1 project for three language combinations, considering translations from German, Italian and Dutch into English. We present a comparative evaluation of the MT software developed within the project against four of the leading free webbased MT systems across a range of state-of-the-art automatic evaluation metrics. The data sets from the news domain that were created and used for training purposes and also for this evaluation exercise, which are available to the research community, are also described. The evaluation results for the news domain are very encouraging: the CoSyne MT software consistently beats the rule-based MT systems, and for translations from Italian and Dutch into English in particular the scores given by some of the standard automatic evaluation metrics are not too distant from those obtained by wellestablished statistical online MT systems

Machine translation evaluation resources and methods: a survey

We introduce the Machine Translation (MT) evaluation survey that contains both manual and automatic evaluation methods. The traditional human evaluation criteria mainly include the intelligibility, fidelity, fluency, adequacy, comprehension, and informativeness. The advanced human assessments include task-oriented measures, post-editing, segment ranking, and extended criteriea, etc. We classify the automatic evaluation methods into two categories, including lexical similarity scenario and linguistic features application. The lexical similarity methods contain edit distance, precision, recall, F-measure, and word order. The linguistic features can be divided into syntactic features and semantic features respectively. The syntactic features include part of speech tag, phrase types and sentence structures, and the semantic features include named entity, synonyms, textual entailment, paraphrase, semantic roles, and language models. The deep learning models for evaluation are very newly proposed. Subsequently, we also introduce the evaluation methods for MT evaluation including different correlation scores, and the recent quality estimation (QE) tasks for MT. This paper differs from the existing works\cite {GALEprogram2009, EuroMatrixProject2007} from several aspects, by introducing some recent development of MT evaluation measures, the different classifications from manual to automatic evaluation measures, the introduction of recent QE tasks of MT, and the concise construction of the content

Evaluation of Automatic Video Captioning Using Direct Assessment

We present Direct Assessment, a method for manually assessing the quality of automatically-generated captions for video. Evaluating the accuracy of video captions is particularly difficult because for any given video clip there is no definitive ground truth or correct answer against which to measure. Automatic metrics for comparing automatic video captions against a manual caption such as BLEU and METEOR, drawn from techniques used in evaluating machine translation, were used in the TRECVid video captioning task in 2016 but these are shown to have weaknesses. The work presented here brings human assessment into the evaluation by crowdsourcing how well a caption describes a video. We automatically degrade the quality of some sample captions which are assessed manually and from this we are able to rate the quality of the human assessors, a factor we take into account in the evaluation. Using data from the TRECVid video-to-text task in 2016, we show how our direct assessment method is replicable and robust and should scale to where there many caption-generation techniques to be evaluated.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure

Character-level Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) is nowadays commonly applied at the subword level, using byte-pair encoding. A promising alternative approach focuses on character-level translation, which simplifies processing pipelines in NMT considerably. This approach, however, must consider relatively longer sequences, rendering the training process prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we discuss a novel, Transformer-based approach, that we compare, both in speed and in quality to the Transformer at subword and character levels, as well as previously developed character-level models. We evaluate our models on 4 language pairs from WMT'15: DE-EN, CS-EN, FI-EN and RU-EN. The proposed novel architecture can be trained on a single GPU and is 34% percent faster than the character-level Transformer; still, the obtained results are at least on par with it. In addition, our proposed model outperforms the subword-level model in FI-EN and shows close results in CS-EN. To stimulate further research in this area and close the gap with subword-level NMT, we make all our code and models publicly available

Is all that glitters in MT quality estimation really gold standard?

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