Lessons Learned from a Task-based Evaluation of Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation

Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000)

Abstract

For several years we have been conducting Accuracy Based Evaluations (ABE) of the JANUS speech-to-speech MT system (Gates et al., 1997) which measure quality and fidelity of translation. Recently we have begun to design a Task Based Evaluation for JANUS (Thomas, 1999) which measures goal completion. This paper describes what we have learned by comparing the two types of evaluation. Both evaluations (ABE and TBE) were conducted on a common set of user studies in the semantic domain of travel planning.