BiVert: Bidirectional Vocabulary Evaluation Using Relations for Machine Translation

Carinne Cherf, Yuval Pinter


Abstract
Neural machine translation (NMT) has progressed rapidly in the past few years, promising improvements and quality translations for different languages. Evaluation of this task is crucial to determine the quality of the translation. Overall, insufficient emphasis is placed on the actual sense of the translation in traditional methods. We propose a bidirectional semantic-based evaluation method designed to assess the sense distance of the translation from the source text. This approach employs the comprehensive multilingual encyclopedic dictionary BabelNet. Through the calculation of the semantic distance between the source and its back translation of the output, our method introduces a quantifiable approach that empowers sentence comparison on the same linguistic level. Factual analysis shows a strong correlation between the average evaluation scores generated by our method and the human assessments across various machine translation systems for English-German language pair. Finally, our method proposes a new multilingual approach to rank MT systems without the need for parallel corpora.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.216
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2410–2420
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.216
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carinne Cherf and Yuval Pinter. 2024. BiVert: Bidirectional Vocabulary Evaluation Using Relations for Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2410–2420, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
BiVert: Bidirectional Vocabulary Evaluation Using Relations for Machine Translation (Cherf & Pinter, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.216.pdf