Improving Evaluation of Document-level Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Yvette Graham, Qingsong Ma, Timothy Baldwin, Qun Liu, Carla Parra, Carolina Scarton


Abstract
Meaningful conclusions about the relative performance of NLP systems are only possible if the gold standard employed in a given evaluation is both valid and reliable. In this paper, we explore the validity of human annotations currently employed in the evaluation of document-level quality estimation for machine translation (MT). We demonstrate the degree to which MT system rankings are dependent on weights employed in the construction of the gold standard, before proposing direct human assessment as a valid alternative. Experiments show direct assessment (DA) scores for documents to be highly reliable, achieving a correlation of above 0.9 in a self-replication experiment, in addition to a substantial estimated cost reduction through quality controlled crowd-sourcing. The original gold standard based on post-edits incurs a 10–20 times greater cost than DA.
Anthology ID:
E17-2057
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
356–361
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2057
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yvette Graham, Qingsong Ma, Timothy Baldwin, Qun Liu, Carla Parra, and Carolina Scarton. 2017. Improving Evaluation of Document-level Machine Translation Quality Estimation. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 356–361, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Evaluation of Document-level Machine Translation Quality Estimation (Graham et al., EACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2057.pdf
Data
WMT 2016