Evaluating the IWSLT2023 Speech Translation Tasks: Human Annotations, Automatic Metrics, and Segmentation

Matthias Sperber, Ondřej Bojar, Barry Haddow, Dávid Javorský, Xutai Ma, Matteo Negri, Jan Niehues, Peter Polák, Elizabeth Salesky, Katsuhito Sudoh, Marco Turchi


Abstract
Human evaluation is a critical component in machine translation system development and has received much attention in text translation research. However, little prior work exists on the topic of human evaluation for speech translation, which adds additional challenges such as noisy data and segmentation mismatches. We take the first steps to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive human evaluation of the results of several shared tasks from the last International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023). We propose an effective evaluation strategy based on automatic resegmentation and direct assessment with segment context. Our analysis revealed that: 1) the proposed evaluation strategy is robust and scores well-correlated with other types of human judgements; 2) automatic metrics are usually, but not always, well-correlated with direct assessment scores; and 3) COMET as a slightly stronger automatic metric than chrF, despite the segmentation noise introduced by the resegmentation step systems. We release the collected human-annotated data in order to encourage further investigation.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.575
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6484–6495
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.575
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthias Sperber, Ondřej Bojar, Barry Haddow, Dávid Javorský, Xutai Ma, Matteo Negri, Jan Niehues, Peter Polák, Elizabeth Salesky, Katsuhito Sudoh, and Marco Turchi. 2024. Evaluating the IWSLT2023 Speech Translation Tasks: Human Annotations, Automatic Metrics, and Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6484–6495, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating the IWSLT2023 Speech Translation Tasks: Human Annotations, Automatic Metrics, and Segmentation (Sperber et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.575.pdf