Machine Translation Meta Evaluation through Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Moghe, Nikita, Fazla, Arnisa, Amrhein, Chantal, Kocmi, Tom, Steedman, Mark, Birch, Alexandra, Sennrich, Rico, Guillou, Liane
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Moghe, Nikita
Fazla, Arnisa
Amrhein, Chantal
Kocmi, Tom
Steedman, Mark
Birch, Alexandra
Sennrich, Rico
Guillou, Liane
author_facet Moghe, Nikita
Fazla, Arnisa
Amrhein, Chantal
Kocmi, Tom
Steedman, Mark
Birch, Alexandra
Sennrich, Rico
Guillou, Liane
contents Recent machine translation (MT) metrics calibrate their effectiveness by correlating with human judgement but without any insights about their behaviour across different error types. Challenge sets are used to probe specific dimensions of metric behaviour but there are very few such datasets and they either focus on a limited number of phenomena or a limited number of language pairs. We introduce ACES, a contrastive challenge set spanning 146 language pairs, aimed at discovering whether metrics can identify 68 translation accuracy errors. These phenomena range from simple alterations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We conduct a large-scale study by benchmarking ACES on 50 metrics submitted to the WMT 2022 and 2023 metrics shared tasks. We benchmark metric performance, assess their incremental performance over successive campaigns, and measure their sensitivity to a range of linguistic phenomena. We also investigate claims that Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective as MT evaluators by evaluating on ACES. Our results demonstrate that different metric families struggle with different phenomena and that LLM-based methods fail to demonstrate reliable performance. Our analyses indicate that most metrics ignore the source sentence, tend to prefer surface-level overlap and end up incorporating properties of base models which are not always beneficial. We expand ACES to include error span annotations, denoted as SPAN-ACES and we use this dataset to evaluate span-based error metrics showing these metrics also need considerable improvement. Finally, we provide a set of recommendations for building better MT metrics, including focusing on error labels instead of scores, ensembling, designing strategies to explicitly focus on the source sentence, focusing on semantic content and choosing the right base model for representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_16313
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Machine Translation Meta Evaluation through Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets
Moghe, Nikita
Fazla, Arnisa
Amrhein, Chantal
Kocmi, Tom
Steedman, Mark
Birch, Alexandra
Sennrich, Rico
Guillou, Liane
Computation and Language
Recent machine translation (MT) metrics calibrate their effectiveness by correlating with human judgement but without any insights about their behaviour across different error types. Challenge sets are used to probe specific dimensions of metric behaviour but there are very few such datasets and they either focus on a limited number of phenomena or a limited number of language pairs. We introduce ACES, a contrastive challenge set spanning 146 language pairs, aimed at discovering whether metrics can identify 68 translation accuracy errors. These phenomena range from simple alterations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We conduct a large-scale study by benchmarking ACES on 50 metrics submitted to the WMT 2022 and 2023 metrics shared tasks. We benchmark metric performance, assess their incremental performance over successive campaigns, and measure their sensitivity to a range of linguistic phenomena. We also investigate claims that Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective as MT evaluators by evaluating on ACES. Our results demonstrate that different metric families struggle with different phenomena and that LLM-based methods fail to demonstrate reliable performance. Our analyses indicate that most metrics ignore the source sentence, tend to prefer surface-level overlap and end up incorporating properties of base models which are not always beneficial. We expand ACES to include error span annotations, denoted as SPAN-ACES and we use this dataset to evaluate span-based error metrics showing these metrics also need considerable improvement. Finally, we provide a set of recommendations for building better MT metrics, including focusing on error labels instead of scores, ensembling, designing strategies to explicitly focus on the source sentence, focusing on semantic content and choosing the right base model for representations.
title Machine Translation Meta Evaluation through Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16313