Unsupervised quality estimation for neural machine translation
File(s)tacl_a_00330.pdf (1.27 MB)
Published version
OA Location
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Quality Estimation (QE) is an important component in making Machine Translation (MT) useful in real-world applications, as it is aimed to inform the user on the quality of the MT output at test time. Existing approaches require large amounts of expert annotated data, computation and time for training. As an alternative, we devise an unsupervised approach to QE where no training or access to additional resources besides the MT system itself is required. Different from most of the current work that treats the MT system as a black box, we explore useful information that can be extracted from the MT system as a by-product of translation. By employing methods for uncertainty quantification, we achieve very good correlation with human judgments of quality, rivalling state-of-the-art supervised QE models. To evaluate our approach we collect the first dataset that enables work on both black-box and glass-box approaches to QE.
Date Issued
2020-09-01
Date Acceptance
2020-04-01
Citation
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2020, 8 (1), pp.539-555
ISSN
2307-387X
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
Start Page
539
End Page
555
Journal / Book Title
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume
8
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
Identifier
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/tacl_a_00330
Subjects
0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
1702 Cognitive Sciences
2004 Linguistics
Publication Status
Published online
Date Publish Online
2020-09-01