Mining the Correlation between Human and Automatic Evaluation at Sentence Level

By Yanli Sun. 2010

12 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Automatic evaluation metrics are fast and cost-effective measurements of the quality of a Machine Translation (MT) system. However, as humans are the end-user of MT output, human judgement is the benchmark to assess the usefulness of automatic evaluation metrics. While most studies report the correlation between human evaluation and automatic evaluation at corpus level, our study examines their correlation at sentence level. In addition to the statistical correlation scores, such as Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient, a finer-grained and detailed examination of the sensitivity of automatic metrics compared to human evaluation is also reported in this study. The results show that the threshold for human evaluators to agree with the judgements of automatic metrics varies with the automatic metrics at sentence level. While the automatic scores for two translations are greatly different, human evaluators may consider the translations to be qualitatively similar and vice versa. The detailed analysis of the correlation between automatic and human evaluation allows us determine with increased confidence whether an increase in the automatic scores will be agreed by human evaluators or not.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Evaluation & Benchmarks

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The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Pascale Fung
  2. Andrea Madotto
  3. Wenliang Dai
  4. Nayeon Lee
  5. Yan Xu
  6. Etsuko Ishii
  7. Ziwei Ji
  8. Dan Su

In Evaluation & Benchmarks

  1. Dan Su
  2. Tiezheng Yu
  3. Andrea Madotto
  4. Etsuko Ishii
  5. Nayeon Lee
  6. Pascale Fung
  7. Wenliang Dai

Citations in the corpus