Beyond Human-Only: Evaluating Human-Machine Collaboration for Collecting High-Quality Translation Data

Zhongtao Liu, Parker Riley, Daniel Deutsch, Alison Lui, Mengmeng Niu, Apurva Shah, Markus Freitag


Abstract
Collecting high-quality translations is crucial for the development and evaluation of machine translation systems. However, traditional human-only approaches are costly and slow. This study presents a comprehensive investigation of 11 approaches for acquiring translation data, including human-only, machine-only, and hybrid approaches. Our findings demonstrate that human-machine collaboration can match or even exceed the quality of human-only translations, while being more cost-efficient. Error analysis reveals the complementary strengths between human and machine contributions, highlighting the effectiveness of collaborative methods. Cost analysis further demonstrates the economic benefits of human-machine collaboration methods, with some approaches achieving top-tier quality at around 60% of the cost of traditional methods. We release a publicly available dataset containing nearly 18,000 segments of varying translation quality with corresponding human ratings to facilitate future research.
Anthology ID:
2024.wmt-1.110
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1095–1106
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.110
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhongtao Liu, Parker Riley, Daniel Deutsch, Alison Lui, Mengmeng Niu, Apurva Shah, and Markus Freitag. 2024. Beyond Human-Only: Evaluating Human-Machine Collaboration for Collecting High-Quality Translation Data. In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1095–1106, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Human-Only: Evaluating Human-Machine Collaboration for Collecting High-Quality Translation Data (Liu et al., WMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.110.pdf