Ananya Sai B


2023

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IndicMT Eval: A Dataset to Meta-Evaluate Machine Translation Metrics for Indian Languages
Ananya Sai B | Tanay Dixit | Vignesh Nagarajan | Anoop Kunchukuttan | Pratyush Kumar | Mitesh M. Khapra | Raj Dabre
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The rapid growth of machine translation (MT) systems necessitates meta-evaluations of evaluation metrics to enable selection of those that best reflect MT quality. Unfortunately, most meta-evaluation studies focus on European languages, the observations for which may not always apply to other languages. Indian languages, having over a billion speakers, are linguistically different from them, and to date, there are no such systematic studies focused solely on English to Indian language MT. This paper fills this gap through a Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) dataset consisting of 7000 fine-grained annotations, spanning 5 Indian languages and 7 MT systems. We evaluate 16 metrics and show that, pre-trained metrics like COMET have the highest correlations with annotator scores as opposed to n-gram metrics like BLEU. We further leverage our MQM annotations to develop an Indic-COMET metric and show that it outperforms COMET counterparts in both human scores correlations and robustness scores in Indian languages. Additionally, we show that the Indic-COMET can outperform COMET on some unseen Indian languages. We hope that our dataset and analysis will facilitate further research in Indic MT evaluation.