We report the results of the WMT 2024 shared task on Quality Estimation, in which the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels, without access to reference translations. In this edition, we expanded our scope to assess the potential for quality estimates to help in the correction of translated outputs, hence including an automated post-editing (APE) direction. We publish new test sets with human annotations that target two directions: providing new Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) annotations for three multi-domain language pairs (English to German, Spanish and Hindi) and extending the annotations on Indic languages providing direct assessments and post edits for translation from English into Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu. We also perform a detailed analysis of the behaviour of different models with respect to different phenomena including gender bias, idiomatic language, and numerical and entity perturbations. We received submissions based both on traditional, encoder-based approaches as well as large language model (LLM) based ones.

Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of evaluating machine translation output in the absence of reference translation. Conventional approaches to QE involve training separate models at different levels of granularity viz., word-level, sentence-level, and document-level, which sometimes lead to inconsistent predictions for the same input. To overcome this limitation, we focus on jointly training a single model for sentence-level and word-level QE tasks in a multi-task learning framework. Using two multi-task learning-based QE approaches, we show that multi-task learning improves the performance of both tasks. We evaluate these approaches by performing experiments in different settings, viz., single-pair, multi-pair, and zero-shot. We compare the multi-task learning-based approach with baseline QE models trained on single tasks and observe an improvement of up to 4.28% in Pearson’s correlation (r) at sentence-level and 8.46% in F1-score at word-level, in the single-pair setting. In the multi-pair setting, we observe improvements of up to 3.04% at sentence-level and 13.74% at word-level; while in the zero-shot setting, we also observe improvements of up to 5.26% and 3.05%, respectively. We make the models proposed in this paper publically available.

Automatic Post-Editing (APE) systems are prone to over-correction of the Machine Translation (MT) outputs. While Word-level Quality Estimation (QE) system can provide a way to curtail the over-correction, a significant performance gain has not been observed thus far by utilizing existing APE and QE combination strategies. In this paper, we propose joint training of a model on APE and QE tasks to improve the APE. Our proposed approach utilizes a multi-task learning (MTL) methodology, which shows significant improvement while treating both tasks as a ‘bargaining game’ during training. Moreover, we investigate various existing combination strategies and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for a ‘distant’ language pair, viz., English-Marathi. We observe an improvement of 1.09 TER and 1.37 BLEU points over a baseline QE-Unassisted APE system for English-Marathi, while also observing 0.46 TER and 0.62 BLEU points for English-German. Further, we discuss the results qualitatively and show how our approach helps reduce over-correction, thereby improving the APE performance. We also observe that the degree of integration between QE and APE directly correlates with the APE performance gain. We release our code and models publicly.

This paper is related to the submission of the CFILT-IITB team for the task called IndicMT in WMT23. The paper describes our MT systems submitted to the WMT23 IndicMT shared task. The task focused on MT system development from/to English and four low-resource North-East Indian languages, viz., Assamese, Khasi, Manipuri, and Mizo. We trained them on a small parallel corpus resulting in poor-quality systems. Therefore, we utilize transfer learning with the help of a large pre-trained multilingual NMT system. Since this approach produced the best results, we submitted our NMT models for the shared task using this approach.

This paper describes IIT Bombay’s submission to the WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) shared task for the English-Marathi (En-Mr) language pair. We follow the curriculum training strategy to train our APE system. First, we train an encoder-decoder model to perform translation from English to Marathi. Next, we add another encoder to the model and train the resulting dual-encoder single-decoder model for the APE task. This involves training the model using the synthetic APE data in multiple training stages and then fine-tuning it using the real APE data. We use the LaBSE technique to ensure the quality of the synthetic APE data. For data augmentation, along with using candidates obtained from an external machine translation (MT) system, we also use the phrase-level APE triplets generated using phrase table injection. As APE systems are prone to the problem of ‘over-correction’, we use a sentence-level quality estimation (QE) system to select the final output between an original translation and the corresponding output generated by the APE model. Our approach improves the TER and BLEU scores on the development set by -3.92 and +4.36 points, respectively. Also, the final results on the test set show that our APE system outperforms the baseline system by -3.49 TER points and +5.37 BLEU points.