In this paper the authors wish to present a view of translation equivalence related to a pragmatics-based approach to machine translation. We will argue that current evaluation methods which assume that there is a predictable correspondence between language forms cannot adequately account for this view. We will then describe a method for objectively determining the relative equivalence of two texts. However, given the need for both an open world assumption and non-monotonic inferencing, such a method cannot be realistically implemented and therefore certain "classic" evaluation strategies will continue to be preferable as practical methods of evaluation.

Two string comparison measures, edit distance and n-gram co-occurrence, are tested for automatic evaluation of translation quality, where the quality is compared to one or several reference translations. The measures are tested in combination for diagnostic evaluation on segments. Both measures have been used for evaluation of translation quality before, but for another evaluation purpose (performance) and with another granularity (system). Preliminary experiments showed that the measures are not portable without redefinitions, so two new measures are defined, WAFT and NEVA. The new measures could be applied for both purposes and granularities.

This paper looks at granularity issues in machine translation evaluation. We start with work by (White, 2001) who examined the correlation between intelligibility and fidelity at the document level. His work showed that intelligibility and fidelity do not correlate well at the document level. These dissimilarities lead to our investigation of evaluation granularity. In particular, we revisit the intelligibility and fidelity relationship at the corpus level. We expect these to support certain assumptions in both evaluations as well as indicate issues germane to future evaluations.

Even with recent, renewed attention to MT evaluation—due in part to n-gram-based metrics (Papineni et al., 2001; Doddington, 2002) and the extensive, online catalogue of MT metrics on the ISLE project (Hovy et al., 2001, 2003), few reports involving task-based metrics have surfaced. This paper presents our work on three parts of task-based MT evaluation: (i) software to track and record users' task performance via a browser, run from a desktop computer or remotely over the web, (ii) factorial experimental design with replicate observations to compare the MT engines, based on the accuracy of users' task responses, and (iii) the use of chi-squared and generalized linear models (GLMs) to permit finer-grained data analyses. We report on the experimental results of a six-way document categorization task, used for the evaluation of three Korean-English MT engines. The statistical models of the probabilities of correct responses yield an ordering of the MT engines, with one engine having a statistically significant lead over the other two. Future research will involve testing user performance on linguistically more complex tasks, as well as extending our initial GLMs with the documents' Bleu scores as variables, to test the scores as independent predictors of task results.