Papers › HUME: Human UCCA-Based Evaluation of Machine Translation
HUME: Human UCCA-Based Evaluation of Machine Translation
Alexandra Birch, Omri Abend, Ondrej Bojar, Barry Haddow
Human evaluation of machine translation normally uses sentence-level measures such as relative ranking or adequacy scales. However, these provide no insight into possible errors, and do not scale well with sentence length. We argue for a semantics-based evaluation, which captures what meaning components are retained in the MT output, thus providing a more fine-grained analysis of translation quality, and enabling the construction and tuning of semantics-based MT. We present a novel human semantic evaluation measure, Human UCCA-based MT Evaluation (HUME), building on the UCCA semantic representation scheme. HUME covers a wider range of semantic phenomena than previous methods and does not rely on semantic annotation of the potentially garbled MT output. We experiment with four language pairs, demonstrating HUME's broad applicability, and report good inter-annotator agreement rates and correlation with human adequacy scores.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections