Fine-grained evaluation of German-English Machine Translation based on a Test Suite

Vivien Macketanz, Eleftherios Avramidis, Aljoscha Burchardt, Hans Uszkoreit


Abstract
We present an analysis of 16 state-of-the-art MT systems on German-English based on a linguistically-motivated test suite. The test suite has been devised manually by a team of language professionals in order to cover a broad variety of linguistic phenomena that MT often fails to translate properly. It contains 5,000 test sentences covering 106 linguistic phenomena in 14 categories, with an increased focus on verb tenses, aspects and moods. The MT outputs are evaluated in a semi-automatic way through regular expressions that focus only on the part of the sentence that is relevant to each phenomenon. Through our analysis, we are able to compare systems based on their performance on these categories. Additionally, we reveal strengths and weaknesses of particular systems and we identify grammatical phenomena where the overall performance of MT is relatively low.
Anthology ID:
W18-6436
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Belgium, Brussels
Editors:
Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Lucia Specia, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
578–587
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6436
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6436
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vivien Macketanz, Eleftherios Avramidis, Aljoscha Burchardt, and Hans Uszkoreit. 2018. Fine-grained evaluation of German-English Machine Translation based on a Test Suite. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, pages 578–587, Belgium, Brussels. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-grained evaluation of German-English Machine Translation based on a Test Suite (Macketanz et al., WMT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6436.pdf