Vitalii Iakivchuk
Author directory2026
Using Model Disagreement to Identify Unstable Regions in MT Evaluation
Vitalii Iakivchuk
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Vitalii Iakivchuk
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Human evaluation of MT is essential but exhibits substantial annotator variability that limits evaluation reliability and super- vised learning. Rather than treating dis- agreement as noise or correcting it through protocol changes, we analyze its structure via learned severity classifiers. Across training regimes defined by base- line model reproducibility, we observe in- ternally coherent but mutually incompati- ble severity mappings: models trained on one regime produce confident predictions within that regime but reduced separability on the other. Margin–correctness analysis shows that instability is not uniformly low confidence; separability depends on align- ment between model-internalized and hu- man annotation regimes. These results indicate that unstable MT evaluation regions arise primarily from competing severity interpretations rather than intrinsic example difficulty. Model– annotator disagreement therefore provides a practical signal for identifying unstable evaluation regions during MT evaluation.