Papers › KoBE: Knowledge-Based Machine Translation Evaluation

KoBE: Knowledge-Based Machine Translation Evaluation

23 Sep 2020Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020arXiv:2009.11027archive 2025-07-28

Zorik Gekhman, Roee Aharoni, Genady Beryozkin, Markus Freitag, Wolfgang Macherey

We propose a simple and effective method for machine translation evaluation which does not require reference translations. Our approach is based on (1) grounding the entity mentions found in each source sentence and candidate translation against a large-scale multilingual knowledge base, and (2) measuring the recall of the grounded entities found in the candidate vs. those found in the source. Our approach achieves the highest correlation with human judgements on 9 out of the 18 language pairs from the WMT19 benchmark for evaluation without references, which is the largest number of wins for a single evaluation method on this task. On 4 language pairs, we also achieve higher correlation with human judgements than BLEU. To foster further research, we release a dataset containing 1.8 million grounded entity mentions across 18 language pairs from the WMT19 metrics track data.

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Machine TranslationSentenceTranslation

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