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China Workshop on Machine Translation

CWMT 2017: Machine Translation pp 68–77Cite as

ENTF: An Entropy-Based MT Evaluation Metric

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Part of the Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS,volume 787)

Abstract

The widely-used automatic evaluation metrics cannot adequately reflect the fluency of the translations. The n-gram-based metrics, like BLEU, limit the maximum length of matched fragments to n and cannot catch the matched fragments longer than n, so they can only reflect the fluency indirectly. METEOR, which is not limited by n-gram, uses the number of matched chunks but it does not consider the length of each chunk. In this paper, we propose an entropy-based metric (ENTF), which can sufficiently reflect the fluency of translations through the distribution of matched words. To evaluate the accuracy, we also introduce the unigram F-score into the new metric. Experiment shows that ENTF obtains state-of-the-art performance on system level, and is comparable with METEOR on sentence level on into English direction on WMT 2012, WMT 2013 and WMT 2014.

Keywords

  • Automatic evaluation metric
  • Machine translation
  • Entropy-based metric

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The words in each chunk are in adjacent positions in the hypothesis, and are also mapped to unigrams that are in adjacent positions in the reference.

  2. 2.

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alavie/METEOR/.

  3. 3.

    http://wordnet.princeton.edu/.

  4. 4.

    ftp://jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov/mt/resources/mteval-v13a.pl.

  5. 5.

    http://www.cs.umd.edu/~snover/tercom.

  6. 6.

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alavie/METEOR/download/meteor-1.4.tgz.

  7. 7.

    ftp://jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov/mt/resources/mteval-v13a.pl.

  8. 8.

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alavie/METEOR/download/meteor-1.4.tgz.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of P. R. China under Grant Nos. 61379086, 61602284, 61602285, 61602282 and Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. ZR2015FQ009. Qun Liu’s work is partially supported by the Science Foundation Ireland (Grant 13/RC/2106) as part of the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

    Hui Yu & Weizhi Xu

  2. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shouxun Lin & Qun Liu

  3. ADAPT Centre, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Qun Liu

Authors
  1. Hui Yu
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  2. Weizhi Xu
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  3. Shouxun Lin
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  4. Qun Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qun Liu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Macau, Macau SAR, China

    Derek F. Wong

  2. Soochow University, Suzhou, China

    Deyi Xiong

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Yu, H., Xu, W., Lin, S., Liu, Q. (2017). ENTF: An Entropy-Based MT Evaluation Metric. In: Wong, D., Xiong, D. (eds) Machine Translation. CWMT 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 787. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7134-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7134-8_7

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