Goodness: A method for measuring machine translation confidence

Abstract

State-of-the-art statistical machine translation (MT) systems have made significant progress towards producing user-acceptable translation output. However, there is still no efficient way for MT systems to inform users which words are likely translated correctly and how confident it is about the whole sentence. We propose a novel framework to predict wordlevel and sentence-level MT errors with a large number of novel features. Experimental results show that the MT error prediction accuracy is increased from 69.1 to 72.2 in F-score. The Pearson correlation between the proposed confidence measure and the human-targeted translation edit rate (HTER) is 0.6. Improvements between 0.4 and 0.9 TER reduction are obtained with the n-best list reranking task using the proposed confidence measure. Also, we present a visualization prototype of MT errors at the word and sentence levels with the objective to improve post-editor productivity. © 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.