Behzad Shayegh
Author directory2026
Mind Which Bird You Favour: Parameterizing Adequacy-Fluency Balance in Meta-Evaluation of Machine Translation
Behzad Shayegh | Niloofar Kazemi
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Behzad Shayegh | Niloofar Kazemi
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
There is a tradeoff in machine translation meta-evaluation between prioritizing alignment with adequacy versus fluency. The balance depends on the combination of translation systems in the meta-evaluation dataset. This system set is a small, filtered sample whose characteristics change heavily across years and language pairs; it does not represent the true system distribution. Consequently, the adequacy-fluency balance is often unrepresentative and subject to change. For sensitive domains, controlling this balance is critical. We expose this balance as a tunable choice. To achieve a target balance, we reweight existing systems while minimizing distortion from uniform weighting, ensuring the evaluated systems remain real and representative. We provide an exact optimization algorithm with theoretical guarantees and pruning mechanisms to compute these weights. To validate meta-evaluation internal consistency, we design a scorer-augmentation framework that establishes a known relative identity for the scorers. Results demonstrate that our reweighting method effectively controls the adequacy-fluency balance and preserves the internal consistency, outperforming prior approaches. Finally, we analyze the performance of popular scorers across a sweep of this parameter.
2025
Feeding Two Birds or Favoring One? Adequacy–Fluency Tradeoffs in Evaluation and Meta-Evaluation of Machine Translation
Behzad Shayegh | Jan-Thorsten Peter | David Vilar | Tobias Domhan | Juraj Juraska | Markus Freitag | Lili Mou
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation
Behzad Shayegh | Jan-Thorsten Peter | David Vilar | Tobias Domhan | Juraj Juraska | Markus Freitag | Lili Mou
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation
We investigate the tradeoff between adequacy and fluency in machine translation. We show the severity of this tradeoff at the evaluation level and analyze where popular metrics fall within it. Essentially, current metrics generally lean toward adequacy, meaning that their scores correlate more strongly with the adequacy of translations than with fluency. More importantly, we find that this tradeoff also persists at the meta-evaluation level, and that the standard WMT meta-evaluation favors adequacy-oriented metrics over fluency-oriented ones. We show that this bias is partially attributed to the composition of the systems included in the meta-evaluation datasets. To control this bias, we propose a method that synthesizes translation systems in meta-evaluation. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding this tradeoff in meta-evaluation and its impact on metric rankings.
2024
Tree-Averaging Algorithms for Ensemble-Based Unsupervised Discontinuous Constituency Parsing
Behzad Shayegh | Yuqiao Wen | Lili Mou
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Behzad Shayegh | Yuqiao Wen | Lili Mou
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
We address unsupervised discontinuous constituency parsing, where we observe a high variance in the performance of the only previous model in the literature. We propose to build an ensemble of different runs of the existing discontinuous parser by averaging the predicted trees, to stabilize and boost performance. To begin with, we provide comprehensive computational complexity analysis (in terms of P and NP-complete) for tree averaging under different setups of binarity and continuity. We then develop an efficient exact algorithm to tackle the task, which runs in a reasonable time for all samples in our experiments. Results on three datasets show our method outperforms all baselines in all metrics; we also provide in-depth analyses of our approach.