A Linguistically Motivated Test Suite to Semi-Automatically Evaluate German–English Machine Translation Output

Vivien Macketanz, Eleftherios Avramidis, Aljoscha Burchardt, He Wang, Renlong Ai, Shushen Manakhimova, Ursula Strohriegel, Sebastian Möller, Hans Uszkoreit


Abstract
This paper presents a fine-grained test suite for the language pair German–English. The test suite is based on a number of linguistically motivated categories and phenomena and the semi-automatic evaluation is carried out with regular expressions. We describe the creation and implementation of the test suite in detail, providing a full list of all categories and phenomena. Furthermore, we present various exemplary applications of our test suite that have been implemented in the past years, like contributions to the Conference of Machine Translation, the usage of the test suite and MT outputs for quality estimation, and the expansion of the test suite to the language pair Portuguese–English. We describe how we tracked the development of the performance of various systems MT systems over the years with the help of the test suite and which categories and phenomena are prone to resulting in MT errors. For the first time, we also make a large part of our test suite publicly available to the research community.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.99
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:
936–947
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.99
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vivien Macketanz, Eleftherios Avramidis, Aljoscha Burchardt, He Wang, Renlong Ai, Shushen Manakhimova, Ursula Strohriegel, Sebastian Möller, and Hans Uszkoreit. 2022. A Linguistically Motivated Test Suite to Semi-Automatically Evaluate German–English Machine Translation Output. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 936–947, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Linguistically Motivated Test Suite to Semi-Automatically Evaluate German–English Machine Translation Output (Macketanz et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.99.pdf
Code
 dfki-nlp/mt-testsuite
Data
WMT 2020