Training a Super Model Look-Alike: Featuring Edit Distance, N-Gram Occurrence, and One Reference Translation

Abstract

Two string comparison measures, edit distance and n-gram co-occurrence, are tested for automatic evaluation of translation quality, where the quality is compared to one or several reference translations. The measures are tested in combination for diagnostic evaluation on segments. Both measures have been used for evaluation of translation quality before, but for another evaluation purpose (performance) and with another granularity (system). Preliminary experiments showed that the measures are not portable without redefinitions, so two new measures are defined, WAFT and NEVA. The new measures could be applied for both purposes and granularities