Quality expectations of machine translation

Machine Translation (MT) is being deployed for a range of use-cases by millions of people on a daily basis. There should, therefore, be no doubt as to the utility of MT. However, not everyone is convinced that MT can be useful, especially as a productivity enhancer for human translators. In this chapter, I address this issue, describing how MT is currently deployed, how its output is evaluated and how this could be enhanced, especially as MT quality itself improves. Central to these issues is the acceptance that there is no longer a single ‘gold standard’ measure of quality, such that the situation in which MT is deployed needs to be borne in mind, especially with respect to the expected ‘shelf-life’ of the translation itself

Findings of the 2016 Conference on Machine Translation.

This paper presents the results of the WMT16 shared tasks, which included five machine translation (MT) tasks (standard news, IT-domain, biomedical, multimodal, pronoun), three evaluation tasks (metrics, tuning, run-time estimation of MT quality), and an automatic post-editing task and bilingual document alignment task. This year, 102 MT systems from 24 institutions (plus 36 anonymized online systems) were submitted to the 12 translation directions in the news translation task. The IT-domain task received 31 submissions from 12 institutions in 7 directions and the Biomedical task received 15 submissions systems from 5 institutions. Evaluation was both automatic and manual (relative ranking and 100-point scale assessments). The quality estimation task had three subtasks, with a total of 14 teams, submitting 39 entries. The automatic post-editing task had a total of 6 teams, submitting 11 entries