Towards a Better Evaluation of Metrics for Machine Translation

Peter Stanchev, Weiyue Wang, Hermann Ney


Abstract
An important aspect of machine translation is its evaluation, which can be achieved through the use of a variety of metrics. To compare these metrics, the workshop on statistical machine translation annually evaluates metrics based on their correlation with human judgement. Over the years, methods for measuring correlation with humans have changed, but little research has been performed on what the optimal methods for acquiring human scores are and how human correlation can be measured. In this work, the methods for evaluating metrics at both system- and segment-level are analyzed in detail and their shortcomings are pointed out.
Anthology ID:
2020.wmt-1.103
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Yvette Graham, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
928–933
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.103
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peter Stanchev, Weiyue Wang, and Hermann Ney. 2020. Towards a Better Evaluation of Metrics for Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 928–933, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Better Evaluation of Metrics for Machine Translation (Stanchev et al., WMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.103.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939548