Physician Detection of Clinical Harm in Machine Translation: Quality Estimation Aids in Reliance and Backtranslation Identifies Critical Errors

Nikita Mehandru, Sweta Agrawal, Yimin Xiao, Ge Gao, Elaine Khoong, Marine Carpuat, Niloufar Salehi


Abstract
A major challenge in the practical use of Machine Translation (MT) is that users lack information on translation quality to make informed decisions about how to rely on outputs. Progress in quality estimation research provides techniques to automatically assess MT quality, but these techniques have primarily been evaluated in vitro by comparison against human judgments outside of a specific context of use. This paper evaluates quality estimation feedback in vivo with a human study in realistic high-stakes medical settings. Using Emergency Department discharge instructions, we study how interventions based on quality estimation versus backtranslation assist physicians in deciding whether to show MT outputs to a patient. We find that quality estimation improves appropriate reliance on MT, but backtranslation helps physicians detect more clinically harmful errors that QE alone often misses.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.712
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11633–11647
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.712
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.712
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikita Mehandru, Sweta Agrawal, Yimin Xiao, Ge Gao, Elaine Khoong, Marine Carpuat, and Niloufar Salehi. 2023. Physician Detection of Clinical Harm in Machine Translation: Quality Estimation Aids in Reliance and Backtranslation Identifies Critical Errors. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11633–11647, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Physician Detection of Clinical Harm in Machine Translation: Quality Estimation Aids in Reliance and Backtranslation Identifies Critical Errors (Mehandru et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.712.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.712.mp4