SSA-COMET: Do LLMs Outperform Learned Metrics in Evaluating MT for Under-Resourced African Languages?
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| author | Li, Senyu Wang, Jiayi Ali, Felermino D. M. A. Cherry, Colin Deutsch, Daniel Briakou, Eleftheria Sousa-Silva, Rui Cardoso, Henrique Lopes Stenetorp, Pontus Adelani, David Ifeoluwa |
| author_facet | Li, Senyu Wang, Jiayi Ali, Felermino D. M. A. Cherry, Colin Deutsch, Daniel Briakou, Eleftheria Sousa-Silva, Rui Cardoso, Henrique Lopes Stenetorp, Pontus Adelani, David Ifeoluwa |
| contents | Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent efforts, such as AfriCOMET, have addressed some of the issues, they are still constrained by small evaluation sets, a lack of publicly available training data tailored to African languages, and inconsistent performance in extremely low-resource scenarios. In this work, we introduce SSA-MTE, a large-scale human-annotated MT evaluation (MTE) dataset covering 14 African language pairs from the News domain, with over 73,000 sentence-level annotations from a diverse set of MT systems. Based on this data, we develop SSA-COMET and SSA-COMET-QE, improved reference-based and reference-free evaluation metrics. We also benchmark prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4o, Claude-3.7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Our experimental results show that SSA-COMET models significantly outperform AfriCOMET and are competitive with the strongest LLM Gemini 2.5 Pro evaluated in our study, particularly on low-resource languages such as Twi, Luo, and Yoruba. All resources are released under open licenses to support future research. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04557 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | SSA-COMET: Do LLMs Outperform Learned Metrics in Evaluating MT for Under-Resourced African Languages? Li, Senyu Wang, Jiayi Ali, Felermino D. M. A. Cherry, Colin Deutsch, Daniel Briakou, Eleftheria Sousa-Silva, Rui Cardoso, Henrique Lopes Stenetorp, Pontus Adelani, David Ifeoluwa Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent efforts, such as AfriCOMET, have addressed some of the issues, they are still constrained by small evaluation sets, a lack of publicly available training data tailored to African languages, and inconsistent performance in extremely low-resource scenarios. In this work, we introduce SSA-MTE, a large-scale human-annotated MT evaluation (MTE) dataset covering 14 African language pairs from the News domain, with over 73,000 sentence-level annotations from a diverse set of MT systems. Based on this data, we develop SSA-COMET and SSA-COMET-QE, improved reference-based and reference-free evaluation metrics. We also benchmark prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4o, Claude-3.7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Our experimental results show that SSA-COMET models significantly outperform AfriCOMET and are competitive with the strongest LLM Gemini 2.5 Pro evaluated in our study, particularly on low-resource languages such as Twi, Luo, and Yoruba. All resources are released under open licenses to support future research. |
| title | SSA-COMET: Do LLMs Outperform Learned Metrics in Evaluating MT for Under-Resourced African Languages? |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04557 |