Pearmut: Human Evaluation of Translation Made Trivial

Vilém Zouhar, Tom Kocmi


Abstract
Human evaluation is the gold standard for multilingual NLP, but is often skipped in practice and substituted with automatic metrics, because it is notoriously complex and slow to set up with existing tools with substantial engineering and operational overhead. We introduce Pearmut, a lightweight yet feature-rich platform that makes end-to-end human evaluation as easy to run as automatic evaluation. Pearmut removes common entry barriers and provides support for evaluating multilingual tasks, with a particular focus on machine translation. The platform implements standard evaluation protocols, including DA, ESA, or MQM, but is also extensible to allow prototyping new protocols. It features document-level context, absolute and contrastive evaluation, attention checks, ESAAI pre-annotations and both static and active learning-based assignment strategies. Pearmut enables reliable human evaluation to become a practical, routine component of model development and diagnosis rather than an occasional effort.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-demos.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Sweta Agrawal, Alberto Abad
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
66–86
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-demos.7/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vilém Zouhar and Tom Kocmi. 2026. Pearmut: Human Evaluation of Translation Made Trivial. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 66–86, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pearmut: Human Evaluation of Translation Made Trivial (Zouhar & Kocmi, EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-demos.7.pdf