Word Embedding-Based Automatic MT Evaluation Metric using Word Position Information

Hiroshi Echizen’ya, Kenji Araki, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
We propose a new automatic evaluation metric for machine translation. Our proposed metric is obtained by adjusting the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) to the evaluation task. The EMD measure is used to obtain the distance between two probability distributions consisting of some signatures having a feature and a weight. We use word embeddings, sentence-level tf-idf, and cosine similarity between two word embeddings, respectively, as the features, weight, and the distance between two features. Results show that our proposed metric can evaluate machine translation based on word meaning. Moreover, for distance, cosine similarity and word position information are used to address word-order differences. We designate this metric as Word Embedding-Based automatic MT evaluation using Word Position Information (WE_WPI). A meta-evaluation using WMT16 metrics shared task set indicates that our WE_WPI achieves the highest correlation with human judgment among several representative metrics.
Anthology ID:
N19-1186
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1874–1883
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1186
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1186
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hiroshi Echizen’ya, Kenji Araki, and Eduard Hovy. 2019. Word Embedding-Based Automatic MT Evaluation Metric using Word Position Information. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1874–1883, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Word Embedding-Based Automatic MT Evaluation Metric using Word Position Information (Echizen’ya et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1186.pdf