A Benchmark for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics on Dialects without Standard Orthography

Noëmi Aepli, Chantal Amrhein, Florian Schottmann, Rico Sennrich


Abstract
For sensible progress in natural language processing, it is important that we are aware of the limitations of the evaluation metrics we use. In this work, we evaluate how robust metrics are to non-standardized dialects, i.e. spelling differences in language varieties that do not have a standard orthography. To investigate this, we collect a dataset of human translations and human judgments for automatic machine translations from English to two Swiss German dialects. We further create a challenge set for dialect variation and benchmark existing metrics’ performances. Our results show that existing metrics cannot reliably evaluate Swiss German text generation outputs, especially on segment level. We propose initial design adaptations that increase robustness in the face of non-standardized dialects, although there remains much room for further improvement. The dataset, code, and models are available here: https://github.com/textshuttle/dialect_eval
Anthology ID:
2023.wmt-1.99
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Philipp Koehn, Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1045–1065
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wmt-1.99
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wmt-1.99
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Noëmi Aepli, Chantal Amrhein, Florian Schottmann, and Rico Sennrich. 2023. A Benchmark for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics on Dialects without Standard Orthography. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1045–1065, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Benchmark for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics on Dialects without Standard Orthography (Aepli et al., WMT 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wmt-1.99.pdf