Downstream processing of machine translation (MT) output promises to be a solution to improve translation quality, especially when the MT system’s internal decoding process is not accessible. Both rule-based and statistical automatic postediting (APE) methods have been proposed over the years, but with contrasting results. A missing aspect in previous evaluations is the assessment of different methods: i) under comparable conditions, and ii) on different language pairs featuring variable levels of MT quality. Focusing on statistical APE methods (more portable across languages), we propose the first systematic analysis of two approaches. To understand their potential, we compare them in the same conditions over six language pairs having English as source. Our results evidence consistent improvements on all language pairs, a relation between the extent of the gain and MT output quality, slight but statistically significant performance differences between the two methods, and their possible complementarity.

Exploring the Planet of the APEs: a Comparative Study of State-of-the-art Methods for MT Automatic Post-Editing

Chatterjee, Rajen;Negri, Matteo;Turchi, Marco
2015-01-01

Abstract

Downstream processing of machine translation (MT) output promises to be a solution to improve translation quality, especially when the MT system’s internal decoding process is not accessible. Both rule-based and statistical automatic postediting (APE) methods have been proposed over the years, but with contrasting results. A missing aspect in previous evaluations is the assessment of different methods: i) under comparable conditions, and ii) on different language pairs featuring variable levels of MT quality. Focusing on statistical APE methods (more portable across languages), we propose the first systematic analysis of two approaches. To understand their potential, we compare them in the same conditions over six language pairs having English as source. Our results evidence consistent improvements on all language pairs, a relation between the extent of the gain and MT output quality, slight but statistically significant performance differences between the two methods, and their possible complementarity.
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
ACL15short-APE.pdf

accesso aperto

Tipologia: Documento in Post-print
Licenza: DRM non definito
Dimensione 135.2 kB
Formato Adobe PDF
135.2 kB Adobe PDF Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11582/300444
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
social impact