Representation Based Translation Evaluation Metrics

Precisely evaluating the quality of a translation against human references is a challenging task due to the flexible word ordering of a sentence and the existence of a large number of synonyms for words. This paper proposes to evaluate translations with distributed representations of words and sentences. We study several metrics based on word and sentence representations and their combination. Experiments on the WMT metric task shows that the metric based on the combined representations achieves the best performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art translation metrics by a large margin. In particular, training the distributed representations only needs a reasonable amount of monolingual, unlabeled data that is not necessary drawn from the test domain.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Boxing Chen, Hongyu Guo
• Keywords: ACL 2015, Computational Linguistics