Match without a Referee: Evaluating MT Adequacy without Reference Translations

We address two challenges for automatic ma- chine translation evaluation: a) avoiding the use of reference translations, and b) focusing on adequacy estimation. From an economic perspective, getting rid of costly hand-crafted reference translations (a) permits to alleviate the main bottleneck in MT evaluation. From a system evaluation perspective, pushing semantics into MT (b) is a necessity in order to complement the shallow methods currently used overcoming their limitations. Casting the problem as a cross-lingual textual entail- ment application, we experiment with different benchmarks and evaluation settings. Our method shows high correlation with human judgements and good results on all datasets without relying on reference translations.