Pushing the right buttons: adversarial evaluation of quality estimation
Authors
Kanojia, DipteshFomicheva, Marina
Ranasinghe, Tharindu
Blain, Frederic
Orasan, Constantin
Specia, Lucia
Editors
Barrault, LoricBojar, Ondrej
Bougaris, Fethi
Chatterjee, Rajen
Costa-jussa, Marta R.
Federmann, Christian
Fishel, Mark
Fraser, Alexander
Freitag, Markus
Graham, Yvette
Grundkiewicz, Roman
Guzman, Paco
Haddow, Barry
Huck, Matthias
Yepes, Antonio Jimeno
Koehn, Philipp
Kocmi, Tom
Martins, Andre
Morishita, Makoto
Monz, Christof
Issue Date
2022-01-11
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Current Machine Translation (MT) systems achieve very good results on a growing variety of language pairs and datasets. However, they are known to produce fluent translation outputs that can contain important meaning errors, thus undermining their reliability in practice. Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of automatically assessing the performance of MT systems at test time. Thus, in order to be useful, QE systems should be able to detect such errors. However, this ability is yet to be tested in the current evaluation practices, where QE systems are assessed only in terms of their correlation with human judgements. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a general methodology for adversarial testing of QE for MT. First, we show that despite a high correlation with human judgements achieved by the recent SOTA, certain types of meaning errors are still problematic for QE to detect. Second, we show that on average, the ability of a given model to discriminate between meaningpreserving and meaning-altering perturbations is predictive of its overall performance, thus potentially allowing for comparing QE systems without relying on manual quality annotation.Citation
Kanojia, D., Fomicheva, M., Ranasinghe, T., Blain, F., Orasan, C. and Specia, L. (2021) Pushing the Right Buttons: Adversarial Evaluation of Quality Estimation. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 625–638, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.Additional Links
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.67Type
Conference contributionLanguage
enDescription
© (2021) The Authors. Published by Association for Computational Linguistics. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.67ISBN
9781954085947
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/