UGENT-LT3 SCATE Submission for WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

This paper describes the submission of the UGENT-LT3 SCATE system to the WMT16 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE), viz. English-German word and sentence-level QE. Based on the observation that the data set is homogeneous (all sentences belong to the IT domain), we performed bilingual terminology extraction and added features derived from the resulting term list to the well-performing features of the word-level QE task of last year. For sentence-level QE, we analyzed the importance of the features and based on those insights extended the feature set of last year. We also experimented with different learning methods and ensembles. We present our observations from the different experiments we conducted and our submissions for both tasks

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

Findings of the 2016 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT16)

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)

Findings of the 2017 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT17)

This paper presents the results of theWMT17 shared tasks, which included three machine translation (MT) tasks(news, biomedical, and multimodal), two evaluation tasks (metrics and run-time estimation of MT quality), an automatic post-editing task, a neural MT training task, and a bandit learning task

Human Feedback in Statistical Machine Translation

The thesis addresses the challenge of improving Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems via feedback given by humans on translation quality. The amount of human feedback available to systems is inherently low due to cost and time limitations. One of our goals is to simulate such information by automatically generating pseudo-human feedback. This is performed using Quality Estimation (QE) models. QE is a technique for predicting the quality of automatic translations without comparing them to oracle (human) translations, traditionally at the sentence or word levels. QE models are trained on a small collection of automatic translations manually labelled for quality, and then can predict the quality of any number of unseen translations. We propose a number of improvements for QE models in order to increase the reliability of pseudo-human feedback. These include strategies to artificially generate instances for settings where QE training data is scarce. We also introduce a new level of granularity for QE: the level of phrases. This level aims to improve the quality of QE predictions by better modelling inter-dependencies among errors at word level, and in ways that are tailored to phrase-based SMT, where the basic unit of translation is a phrase. This can thus facilitate work on incorporating human feedback during the translation process. Finally, we introduce approaches to incorporate pseudo-human feedback in the form of QE predictions in SMT systems. More specifically, we use quality predictions to select the best translation from a number of alternative suggestions produced by SMT systems, and integrate QE predictions into an SMT system decoder in order to guide the translation generation process