Machine Translation Evaluation beyond the Sentence Level

Abstract

Automatic machine translation evaluation was crucial for the rapid development of machine translation systems over the last two decades. So far, most attention has been paid to the evaluation metrics that work with text on the sentence level and so did the translation systems. Across-sentence translation quality depends on discourse phenomena that may not manifest at all when staying within sentence boundaries (e.g. coreference, discourse connectives, verb tense sequence etc.). To tackle this, we propose several document-level MT evaluation metrics: generalizations of sentence-level metrics, language-(pair)-independent versions of lexical cohesion scores and coreference and morphology preservation in the target texts. We measure their agreement with human judgment on a newly created dataset of pairwise paragraph comparisons for four language pairs.