Papers › Otem&Utem: Over- and Under-Translation Evaluation Metric for NMT

Otem&Utem: Over- and Under-Translation Evaluation Metric for NMT

24 Jul 2018arXiv:1807.08945archive 2025-07-28

Jing Yang, Biao Zhang, Yue Qin, Xiangwen Zhang, Qian Lin, Jinsong Su

Although neural machine translation(NMT) yields promising translation performance, it unfortunately suffers from over- and under-translation is- sues [Tu et al., 2016], of which studies have become research hotspots in NMT. At present, these studies mainly apply the dominant automatic evaluation metrics, such as BLEU, to evaluate the overall translation quality with respect to both adequacy and uency. However, they are unable to accurately measure the ability of NMT systems in dealing with the above-mentioned issues. In this paper, we propose two quantitative metrics, the Otem and Utem, to automatically evaluate the system perfor- mance in terms of over- and under-translation respectively. Both metrics are based on the proportion of mismatched n-grams between gold ref- erence and system translation. We evaluate both metrics by comparing their scores with human evaluations, where the values of Pearson Cor- relation Coefficient reveal their strong correlation. Moreover, in-depth analyses on various translation systems indicate some inconsistency be- tween BLEU and our proposed metrics, highlighting the necessity and significance of our metrics.

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