Translation Difficulty
When deciding on the use of machine translation, we may want to know beforehand the difficulty and hence expected quality for a given translation task.
Translation Difficulty is the main subject of 4 publications. 3 are discussed here.
Publications
The difficulty of translating a text may depend on many factors, such as source, genre, or dialect, some of which may be determined automatically
Katrin Kirchhoff and Owen Rambow and Nizar Habash and Mona Diab (2007):
Semi-Automatic Error Analysis for Large-Scale Statistical Machine Translation Systems, Proceedings of the MT Summit XI
@inproceedings{Kirchhoff:2007:MTSummit,
author = {Katrin Kirchhoff and Owen Rambow and Nizar Habash and Mona Diab},
title = {Semi-Automatic Error Analysis for Large-Scale Statistical Machine Translation Systems},
url = {
http://mt-archive.info/MTS-2007-Kirchhoff.pdf},
googlescholar = {763639448402149823},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {MT} Summit XI},
year = 2007
}
(Kirchhoff et al., 2007).
Birch, Alexandra and Osborne, Miles and Koehn, Philipp (2008):
Predicting Success in Machine Translation, Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
@InProceedings{birch-osborne-koehn:2008:EMNLP,
author = {Birch, Alexandra and Osborne, Miles and Koehn, Philipp},
title = {Predicting Success in Machine Translation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
month = {October},
address = {Honolulu, Hawaii},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
pages = {745--754},
url = {
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D08-1078},
year = 2008
}
Birch et al. (2008) study the quality of machine translation systems for different language pairs, given the same domain of European Parliament proceedings. They find that the amount of reordering, the richness of target side morphology and language similarity are the main determining factors that make translation for a given language pair difficult.
Philipp Koehn and Alexandra Birch and Ralf Steinberger (2009):
462 Machine Translation Systems for Europe, Proceedings of the Twelfth Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit XII)
mentioned in Pivot Languages and Translation Difficulty@inproceedings{MTS09:Koehn1,
author = {Philipp Koehn and Alexandra Birch and Ralf Steinberger},
title = {462 Machine Translation Systems for Europe},
url = {
http://www.mt-archive.info/MTS-2009-Koehn-1.pdf},
googlescholar = {1557205533879607960},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twelfth Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit XII)},
publisher = {International Association for Machine Translation},
location = {Ottawa, Ontario, Canada},
year = 2009
}
Koehn et al. (2009) extend this work to more languages and a different domain, and by using a more refined method to measure the degree of reordering.
Benchmarks
Discussion
Related Topics
Confidence Measures attempt to gauge if the produced output of a machine translation system is reliable.
New Publications
van der Wees, Marlies and Bisazza, Arianna and Monz, Christof (2015):
Five Shades of Noise: Analyzing Machine Translation Errors in User-Generated Text, Proceedings of the Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text
@InProceedings{vanderwees-bisazza-monz:2015:WNUT,
author = {van der Wees, Marlies and Bisazza, Arianna and Monz, Christof},
title = {Five Shades of Noise: Analyzing Machine Translation Errors in User-Generated Text},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text},
month = {July},
address = {Beijing, China},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
pages = {28--37},
url = {
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W15-4304},
year = 2015
}
Wees et al. (2015)