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Concept
Evaluation of machine translation
Summary
Various methods for the evaluation for machine translation have been employed. This article focuses on the evaluation of the output of machine translation, rather than on performance or usability evaluation.
Round-trip translation
A typical way for lay people to assess machine translation quality is to translate from a source language to a target language and back to the source language with the same engine. Though intuitively this may seem like a good method of evaluation, it has been shown that round-trip translation is a "poor predictor of quality". The reason why it is such a poor predictor of quality is reasonably intuitive. A round-trip translation is not testing one system, but two systems: the language pair of the engine for translating into the target language, and the language pair translating back from the target language.
Consider the following examples of round-trip translation performed from English to Italian and Portuguese from Somers (2005):
{|
!Original text
| Select this link to look at our home page.
|-
!Translated
| Selezioni questo collegamento per guardare il nostro Home Page.
|-
!Translated back
| Selections this connection in order to watch our Home Page.
|}
{|
!Original text
| Tit for tat
|-
!Translated
| Melharuco para o tat
|-
!Translated back
| Tit for tat
|}
In the first example, where the text is translated into Italian then back into English—the English text is significantly garbled, but the Italian is a serviceable translation. In the second example, the text translated back into English is perfect, but the Portuguese translation is meaningless; the program thought "tit" was a reference to a tit (bird), which was intended for a "tat", a word it did not understand.
While round-trip translation may be useful to generate a "surplus of fun," the methodology is deficient for serious study of machine translation quality.
This section covers two of the large scale evaluation studies that have had significant impact on the field—the ALPAC 1966 study and the ARPA study.
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