WMT20 Document-Level Markable Error Exploration

Vilém Zouhar, Tereza Vojtěchová, Ondřej Bojar


Abstract
Even though sentence-centric metrics are used widely in machine translation evaluation, document-level performance is at least equally important for professional usage. In this paper, we bring attention to detailed document-level evaluation focused on markables (expressions bearing most of the document meaning) and the negative impact of various markable error phenomena on the translation. For an annotation experiment of two phases, we chose Czech and English documents translated by systems submitted to WMT20 News Translation Task. These documents are from the News, Audit and Lease domains. We show that the quality and also the kind of errors varies significantly among the domains. This systematic variance is in contrast to the automatic evaluation results. We inspect which specific markables are problematic for MT systems and conclude with an analysis of the effect of markable error types on the MT performance measured by humans and automatic evaluation tools.
Anthology ID:
2020.wmt-1.41
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:
371–380
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.41
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vilém Zouhar, Tereza Vojtěchová, and Ondřej Bojar. 2020. WMT20 Document-Level Markable Error Exploration. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 371–380, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WMT20 Document-Level Markable Error Exploration (Zouhar et al., WMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.41.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.wmt-1.41.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939563
Code
 ELITR/wmt20-elitr-testsuite