Evaluation of intralingual machine translation for health communication

Silvana Deilen, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Sergio Garrido, Julian Hörner, Christiane Maaß, Vanessa Theel, Sophie Ziemer


Abstract
In this paper, we describe results of a study on evaluation of intralingual machine translation. The study focuses on machine translations of medical texts into Plain German. The automatically simplified texts were compared with manually simplified texts (i.e., simplified by human experts) as well as with the underlying, unsimplified source texts. We analyse the quality of outputs from three models based on different criteria, such as correctness, readability, and syntactic complexity. We compare the outputs of the three models under analysis between each other, as well as with the existing human translations. The study revealed that system performance depends on the evaluation criteria used and that only one of the three models showed strong similarities to the human translations. Furthermore, we identified various types of errors in all three models. These included not only grammatical mistakes and misspellings, but also incorrect explanations of technical terms and false statements, which in turn led to serious content-related mistakes.
Anthology ID:
2024.eamt-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Sheffield, UK
Editors:
Carolina Scarton, Charlotte Prescott, Chris Bayliss, Chris Oakley, Joanna Wright, Stuart Wrigley, Xingyi Song, Edward Gow-Smith, Rachel Bawden, Víctor M Sánchez-Cartagena, Patrick Cadwell, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Vera Cabarrão, Konstantinos Chatzitheodorou, Mary Nurminen, Diptesh Kanojia, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Note:
Pages:
469–479
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.39
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Silvana Deilen, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Sergio Garrido, Julian Hörner, Christiane Maaß, Vanessa Theel, and Sophie Ziemer. 2024. Evaluation of intralingual machine translation for health communication. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 469–479, Sheffield, UK. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation of intralingual machine translation for health communication (Deilen et al., EAMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.39.pdf