Word Error Rate

By aligning a system's output to a human reference translation, insertions, deletions and substitutions of words can be assessed.

Edit Rate Metrics is the main subject of 12 publications. 6 are discussed here.

Publications

Word error rate was first used for the evaluation of statistical machine translation by Tillmann et al. (1997), who also introduce position-independent error rate. Allowing block movement (Leusch et al., 2003) leads to the definition of the CDER metric (Leusch et al., 2006). TER allows for arbitrary block movements (Snover et al., 2006). MaxSIM uses an efficient polynomial matching algorithm that also uses lemma and part-of-speech tag matches (Chan and Ng, 2008). The way automatic evaluation metrics work also depends on the tokenization of system output and reference translations (Leusch et al., 2005).

Benchmarks

Discussion

Related Topics

New Publications

• Popović, Maja (2016): chrF deconstructed: beta parameters and n-gram weights, Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @InProceedings{popovic:2016:WMT,
  author = {Popovi\'{c}, Maja},
  title = {chrF deconstructed: beta parameters and n-gram weights},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation},
  month = {August},
  address = {Berlin, Germany},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages = {499--504},
  url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2341},
  year = 2016
  }
  Popović (2016)
• Wang, Weiyue and Peter, Jan-Thorsten and Rosendahl, Hendrik and Ney, Hermann (2016): CharacTer: Translation Edit Rate on Character Level, Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @InProceedings{wang-EtAl:2016:WMT,
  author = {Wang, Weiyue and Peter, Jan-Thorsten and Rosendahl, Hendrik and Ney, Hermann},
  title = {CharacTer: Translation Edit Rate on Character Level},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation},
  month = {August},
  address = {Berlin, Germany},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages = {505--510},
  url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2342},
  year = 2016
  }
  Wang et al. (2016)
• Dreyer, Markus and Marcu, Daniel (2012): HyTER: Meaning-Equivalent Semantics for Translation Evaluation, Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @InProceedings{dreyer-marcu:2012:NAACL-HLT,
  author = {Dreyer, Markus and Marcu, Daniel},
  title = {HyTER: Meaning-Equivalent Semantics for Translation Evaluation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  month = {June},
  address = {Montr\'{e}al, Canada},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages = {162--171},
  url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N12-1017},
  year = 2012
  }
  Dreyer and Marcu (2012)
• Wang, Mengqiu and Manning, Christopher (2012): SPEDE: Probabilistic Edit Distance Metrics for MT Evaluation, Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @InProceedings{wang-manning:2012:WMT,
  author = {Wang, Mengqiu and Manning, Christopher},
  title = {SPEDE: Probabilistic Edit Distance Metrics for {MT} Evaluation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation},
  month = {June},
  address = {Montreal, Canada},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages = {73--80},
  url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W12-3107},
  year = 2012
  }
  Wang and Manning (2012)
• Gregor Leusch and Hermann Ney (2009): Edit distances with block movements and error rate confidence estimates, Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @article{MTJ:2009:Leusch,
  author = {Gregor Leusch and Hermann Ney},
  title = {Edit distances with block movements and error rate confidence estimates},
  pages = {129--140},
  journal = {Machine Translation},
  volume = {23},
  number = {2--3},
  month = {September},
  year = 2009
  }
  Leusch and Ney (2009)
• Matthew G. Snover and Nitin Madnani and Bonnie Dorr and Richard Schwartz (2009): TER-Plus: paraphrase, semantic, and alignment enhancements to Translation Edit Rate, Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @article{MTJ:2009:Snover,
  author = {Matthew G. Snover and Nitin Madnani and Bonnie Dorr and Richard Schwartz},
  title = {TER-Plus: paraphrase, semantic, and alignment enhancements to Translation Edit Rate},
  url = {http://web.jhu.edu/sebin/w/e/terplusdorr.pdf},
  googlescholar = {6786121275459855088},
  pages = {117--127},
  journal = {Machine Translation},
  volume = {23},
  number = {2--3},
  month = {September},
  year = 2009
  }
  Snover et al. (2009)