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Re: A possible metric for Machine Translation?




Hi M, 

At 1:59 PM +0200 9/4/98, Maghi King wrote:
>So I was wondering if there might not be some feature (quality
>subcharacteristic in ISO jargon) of MT systems that was just a minimal
>indicator of quality, was pertinent to most applications/uses of MT and
>could be tested relatively easily.
>
>One that springs to mind is preservation of truth values. 

That is, for an input sentence meaning 
  "This sentence is an incorrect translation" 
the following translation 
  "Sentence this one incorrect conversion changing been" 
is better than 
  "This sentence is a correct translation" 
because its truth value polarity is the same as the original?  

There are probably a dozen plausible "minimal indicators" one could choose, 
each one with a strong case.  

I think translation evaluation is simply not reducible to a single metric.  

E

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Eduard Hovy
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