Estimating word-level quality of statistical machine translation output using monolingual information alone

Publication type
A1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Tezcan, A., Hoste, V., & Macken, L.
Journal
NATURAL LANGUAGE ENGINEERING
Volume
26
Issue
1
Pagination
73-94
Download
(.pdf)
Project
SCATE
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Abstract

Various studies show that statistical machine translation (SMT) systems suffer from fluency errors, especially in the form of grammatical errors and errors related to idiomatic word choices. In this study, we
investigate the effectiveness of using monolingual information contained in the machine-translated text
to estimate word-level quality of SMT output.We propose a recurrent neural network architecture which
uses morpho-syntactic features and word embeddings as word representations within surface and syntactic n-grams.We test the proposed method on two language pairs and for two tasks, namely detecting fluency errors and predicting overall post-editing effort. Our results show that this method is effective for capturing all types of fluency errors at once. Moreover, on the task of predicting post-editing effort, while solely relying on monolingual information, it achieves on-par results with the state-of-the-art quality estimation systems which use both bilingual and monolingual information.