Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kocmi, Tom, Zouhar, Vilém, Avramidis, Eleftherios, Grundkiewicz, Roman, Karpinska, Marzena, Popović, Maja, Sachan, Mrinmaya, Shmatova, Mariya
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Kocmi, Tom
Zouhar, Vilém
Avramidis, Eleftherios
Grundkiewicz, Roman
Karpinska, Marzena
Popović, Maja
Sachan, Mrinmaya
Shmatova, Mariya
author_facet Kocmi, Tom
Zouhar, Vilém
Avramidis, Eleftherios
Grundkiewicz, Roman
Karpinska, Marzena
Popović, Maja
Sachan, Mrinmaya
Shmatova, Mariya
contents High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by experts, whose availability may be limited especially for low-resource languages. On the other hand, just assigning overall scores, like Direct Assessment (DA), is simpler and faster and can be done by translators of any level, but is less reliable. In this paper, we introduce Error Span Annotation (ESA), a human evaluation protocol which combines the continuous rating of DA with the high-level error severity span marking of MQM. We validate ESA by comparing it to MQM and DA for 12 MT systems and one human reference translation (English to German) from WMT23. The results show that ESA offers faster and cheaper annotations than MQM at the same quality level, without the requirement of expensive MQM experts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11580
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation
Kocmi, Tom
Zouhar, Vilém
Avramidis, Eleftherios
Grundkiewicz, Roman
Karpinska, Marzena
Popović, Maja
Sachan, Mrinmaya
Shmatova, Mariya
Computation and Language
High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by experts, whose availability may be limited especially for low-resource languages. On the other hand, just assigning overall scores, like Direct Assessment (DA), is simpler and faster and can be done by translators of any level, but is less reliable. In this paper, we introduce Error Span Annotation (ESA), a human evaluation protocol which combines the continuous rating of DA with the high-level error severity span marking of MQM. We validate ESA by comparing it to MQM and DA for 12 MT systems and one human reference translation (English to German) from WMT23. The results show that ESA offers faster and cheaper annotations than MQM at the same quality level, without the requirement of expensive MQM experts.
title Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11580