Translation Canvas: An Explainable Interface to Pinpoint and Analyze Translation Systems

Chinmay Dandekar, Wenda Xu, Xi Xu, Siqi Ouyang, Lei Li


Abstract
With the rapid advancement of machine translation research, evaluation toolkits have become essential for benchmarking system progress. Tools like COMET and SacreBLEU offer single quality score assessments that are effective for pairwise system comparisons. However, these tools provide limited insights for fine-grained system-level comparisons and the analysis of instance-level defects. To address these limitations, we introduce Translation Canvas, an explainable interface designed to pinpoint and analyze translation systems’ performance: 1) Translation Canvas assists machine translation researchers in comprehending system-level model performance by identifying common errors (their frequency and severity) and analyzing relationships between different systems based on various evaluation metrics. 2) It supports fine-grained analysis by highlighting error spans with explanations and selectively displaying systems’ predictions. According to human evaluation, Translation Canvas demonstrates superior performance over COMET and SacreBLEU packages under enjoybility and understandbility criteria.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-demo.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Delia Irazu Hernandez Farias, Tom Hope, Manling Li
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
344–350
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-demo.36
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chinmay Dandekar, Wenda Xu, Xi Xu, Siqi Ouyang, and Lei Li. 2024. Translation Canvas: An Explainable Interface to Pinpoint and Analyze Translation Systems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 344–350, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Translation Canvas: An Explainable Interface to Pinpoint and Analyze Translation Systems (Dandekar et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-demo.36.pdf