Evaluation of Machine Translation (MT) technology is often tied to the requirement for tedious manual judgments of translation quality. While automated MT metrology continues to be an active area of research, a well known and often accepted standard metric is the manual human assessment of adequacy and fluency. There are several software packages that have been used to facilitate these judgments, but for the 2008 NIST Open MT Evaluation, NIST’s Speech Group created an online software tool to accommodate the requirement for centralized data and distributed judges. This paper introduces the NIST TAP-ET application and reviews the reasoning underlying its design. Where available, analysis of data sets judged for Adequacy and Preference using the TAP-ET application will be presented. TAP-ET is freely available and ready to download, and contains a variety of customizable features.

The NIST Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) Evaluation expands its focus in 2008 to encompass the challenge of cross-document and cross-language global integration and reconciliation of information. While past ACE evaluations have been limited to local (within-document) detection and disambiguation of entities, relations and events, the current evaluation adds global (cross-document and cross-language) entity disambiguation tasks for Arabic and English. This paper presents the 2008 ACE XDoc evaluation task and associated infrastructure. We describe the linguistic resources created by LDC to support the evaluation, focusing on new approaches required for data selection, data processing, annotation task definitions and annotation software, and we conclude with a discussion of the metrics developed by NIST to support the evaluation.

In this paper we describe the FAME interlingual speech-to- speech translation System for Spanish, Catalan and English which is intended to assist users in the reservation of a hotel room when calling or visiting abroad. The System has been developed as an extension of the existing NESPOLE! translation system [4] which translates between English, German, Italian and French. After a brief introduction we describe the Spanish and Catalan System components including speech recognition, transcription to IF mapping, IF to text generation and speech synthesis. We also present a task-oriented evaluation method used to inform about system development and some preliminary results.