Results of the WMT13 Metrics Shared Task

This paper presents the results of the WMT13 Metrics Shared Task. We asked participants of this task to score the outputs of the MT systems involved in WMT13 Shared Translation Task. We collected scores of 16 metrics from 8 research groups. In addition to that we computed scores of 5 standard metrics such as BLEU, WER, PER as baselines. Collected scores were evaluated in terms of system level correlation (how well each metric’s scores correlate with WMT13 official human scores) and in terms of segment level correlation (how often a metric agrees with humans in comparing two translations of a particular sentence)

Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201

Fine-grained human evaluation of neural versus phrase-based machine translation

We compare three approaches to statistical machine translation (pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural) by performing a fine-grained manual evaluation via error annotation of the systems' outputs. The error types in our annotation are compliant with the multidimensional quality metrics (MQM), and the annotation is performed by two annotators. Inter-annotator agreement is high for such a task, and results show that the best performing system (neural) reduces the errors produced by the worst system (phrase-based) by 54%.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistic

Results of the WMT14 Metrics Shared Task

This paper presents the results of the WMT14 Metrics Shared Task. We asked participants of this task to score the outputs of the MT systems involved in WMT14 Shared Translation Task. We col- lected scores of 23 metrics from 12 re- search groups. In addition to that we com- puted scores of 6 standard metrics (BLEU, NIST, WER, PER, TER and CDER) as baselines. The collected scores were eval- uated in terms of system level correlation (how well each metric’s scores correlate with WMT14 official manual ranking of systems) and in terms of segment level correlation (how often a metric agrees with humans in comparing two translations of a particular sentence)

English → Russian MT evaluation campaign

This paper presents the settings and the result of the ROMIP 2013 MT shared task for the English→Russian language direction. The quality of generated translations was assessed using automatic metrics and human evaluation. We also discuss ways to reduce human evaluation efforts using pairwise sentence comparisons by human judges to simulate sort operations