Evaluating Subtitle Segmentation for End-to-end Generation Systems

Alina Karakanta, François Buet, Mauro Cettolo, François Yvon


Abstract
Subtitles appear on screen as short pieces of text, segmented based on formal constraints (length) and syntactic/semantic criteria. Subtitle segmentation can be evaluated with sequence segmentation metrics against a human reference. However, standard segmentation metrics cannot be applied when systems generate outputs different than the reference, e.g. with end-to-end subtitling systems. In this paper, we study ways to conduct reference-based evaluations of segmentation accuracy irrespective of the textual content. We first conduct a systematic analysis of existing metrics for evaluating subtitle segmentation. We then introduce Sigma, a Subtitle Segmentation Score derived from an approximate upper-bound of BLEU on segmentation boundaries, which allows us to disentangle the effect of good segmentation from text quality. To compare Sigma with existing metrics, we further propose a boundary projection method from imperfect hypotheses to the true reference. Results show that all metrics are able to reward high quality output but for similar outputs system ranking depends on each metric’s sensitivity to error type. Our thorough analyses suggest Sigma is a promising segmentation candidate but its reliability over other segmentation metrics remains to be validated through correlations with human judgements.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.328
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3069–3078
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.328
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alina Karakanta, François Buet, Mauro Cettolo, and François Yvon. 2022. Evaluating Subtitle Segmentation for End-to-end Generation Systems. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3069–3078, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Subtitle Segmentation for End-to-end Generation Systems (Karakanta et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.328.pdf
Code
 fyvo/evalsubtitle
Data
MuST-Cinema