Reassessing Claims of Human Parity and Super-Human Performance in Machine Translation at WMT 2019

Antonio Toral


Abstract
We reassess the claims of human parity and super-human performance made at the news shared task of WMT2019 for three translation directions: English→German, English→Russian and German→English. First we identify three potential issues in the human evaluation of that shared task: (i) the limited amount of intersen- tential context available, (ii) the limited translation proficiency of the evaluators and (iii) the use of a reference transla- tion. We then conduct a modified eval- uation taking these issues into account. Our results indicate that all the claims of human parity and super-human perfor- mance made at WMT2019 should be re- futed, except the claim of human parity for English→German. Based on our findings, we put forward a set of recommendations and open questions for future assessments of human parity in machine translation.
Anthology ID:
2020.eamt-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Lisboa, Portugal
Editors:
André Martins, Helena Moniz, Sara Fumega, Bruno Martins, Fernando Batista, Luisa Coheur, Carla Parra, Isabel Trancoso, Marco Turchi, Arianna Bisazza, Joss Moorkens, Ana Guerberof, Mary Nurminen, Lena Marg, Mikel L. Forcada
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
185–194
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.20
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antonio Toral. 2020. Reassessing Claims of Human Parity and Super-Human Performance in Machine Translation at WMT 2019. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 185–194, Lisboa, Portugal. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Reassessing Claims of Human Parity and Super-Human Performance in Machine Translation at WMT 2019 (Toral, EAMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.20.pdf
Code
 antot/human_parity_eamt2020