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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings No
Title Comparative Evaluation of the Linguistic Output of MT Systems for Translation and Information Purposes
Authors
  • Elia Yuste
  • Francine Braun-Chen
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Event Title Proceedings of the Machine Translation Summit VII, MT Evaluation Workshop
Place of Publication Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Abstract Text This paper describes a Machine Translation (MT) evaluation experiment where emphasis is placed on the quality of output and the extent to which it is geared to different users' needs. Adopting a very specific scenario, that of a multilingual international organisation, a clear distinction is made between two user classes: translators and administrators. Whereas the first group requires MT output to be accurate and of good post-editable quality in order to produce a polished translation, the second group primarily needs informative data for carrying out other, non-linguistic tasks, and therefore uses MT more as an information-gathering and gisting tool. During the experiment, MT output of three different systems is compared in order to establish which MT system best serves the organisation's multilingual communication and information needs. This is a comparative usability- and adequacy-oriented evaluation in that it attempts to help such organisations decide which system produces the most adequate output for certain well-defined user types. To perform the experiment, criteria relating to both users and MT output are examined with reference to the ISLE taxonomy. The experiment comprises two evaluation phases, the first at sentence level, the second at overall text level. In both phases, evaluators make use of a 1-5 rating scale. Weighted results provide some insight into the systems' usability and adequacy for the purposes described above. As a conclusion, it i s suggested that further research should be devoted to the most critical aspect of this exercise, namely defining meaningful and useful criteria for evaluating the post-editability and informativeness of MT output.
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