Revisiting Round-trip Translation for Quality Estimation

Jihyung Moon, Hyunchang Cho, Eunjeong L. Park


Abstract
Quality estimation (QE), a task of evaluating the quality of translation automatically without human-translated reference, is one of the important challenges for machine translation (MT). As the QE methods, BLEU score for round-trip translation (RTT) had been considered. However, it was found to be a poor predictor of translation quality since BLEU was not an adequate metric to detect semantic similarity between input and RTT. Recently, the pre-trained language models have made breakthroughs in many NLP tasks by providing semantically meaningful word and sentence embeddings. In this paper, we employ the semantic embeddings to RTT-based QE metric. Our method achieves the highest correlations with human judgments compared to WMT 2019 quality estimation metric task submissions. Additionally, we observe that with semantic-level metrics, RTT-based QE is robust to the choice of a backward translation system and shows consistent performance on both SMT and NMT forward translation systems.
Anthology ID:
2020.eamt-1.11
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:
91–104
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jihyung Moon, Hyunchang Cho, and Eunjeong L. Park. 2020. Revisiting Round-trip Translation for Quality Estimation. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 91–104, Lisboa, Portugal. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Revisiting Round-trip Translation for Quality Estimation (Moon et al., EAMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.11.pdf
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