Edit Distances and Their Applications to Downstream Tasks in Research and Commercial Contexts

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Carmo, Félix do, Kanojia, Diptesh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Carmo, Félix do
Kanojia, Diptesh
author_facet Carmo, Félix do
Kanojia, Diptesh
contents The tutorial describes the concept of edit distances applied to research and commercial contexts. We use Translation Edit Rate (TER), Levenshtein, Damerau-Levenshtein, Longest Common Subsequence and $n$-gram distances to demonstrate the frailty of statistical metrics when comparing text sequences. Our discussion disassembles them into their essential components. We discuss the centrality of four editing actions: insert, delete, replace and move words, and show their implementations in openly available packages and toolkits. The application of edit distances in downstream tasks often assumes that these accurately represent work done by post-editors and real errors that need to be corrected in MT output. We discuss how imperfect edit distances are in capturing the details of this error correction work and the implications for researchers and for commercial applications, of these uses of edit distances. In terms of commercial applications, we discuss their integration in computer-assisted translation tools and how the perception of the connection between edit distances and post-editor effort affects the definition of translator rates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_05881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Edit Distances and Their Applications to Downstream Tasks in Research and Commercial Contexts
Carmo, Félix do
Kanojia, Diptesh
Computation and Language
The tutorial describes the concept of edit distances applied to research and commercial contexts. We use Translation Edit Rate (TER), Levenshtein, Damerau-Levenshtein, Longest Common Subsequence and $n$-gram distances to demonstrate the frailty of statistical metrics when comparing text sequences. Our discussion disassembles them into their essential components. We discuss the centrality of four editing actions: insert, delete, replace and move words, and show their implementations in openly available packages and toolkits. The application of edit distances in downstream tasks often assumes that these accurately represent work done by post-editors and real errors that need to be corrected in MT output. We discuss how imperfect edit distances are in capturing the details of this error correction work and the implications for researchers and for commercial applications, of these uses of edit distances. In terms of commercial applications, we discuss their integration in computer-assisted translation tools and how the perception of the connection between edit distances and post-editor effort affects the definition of translator rates.
title Edit Distances and Their Applications to Downstream Tasks in Research and Commercial Contexts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05881