TQ-AutoTest – An Automated Test Suite for (Machine) Translation Quality
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
Abstract
In several areas of NLP evaluation, test suites have been used to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of systems. Today, Machine Translation (MT) quality is usually assessed by shallow automatic comparisons of MT outputs with reference corpora resulting in a number. Especially the trend towards neural MT has renewed peoples’ interest in better and more analytical diagnostic methods for MT quality. In this paper we present TQ-AutoTest, a novel framework that supports a linguistic evaluation of (machine) translations using test suites. Our current test suites comprise about 5000 handcrafted test items for the language pair German–English. The framework supports the creation of tests and the semi-automatic evaluation of the MT results using regular expressions. The expressions help to classify the results as correct, incorrect or as requiring a manual check. The approach can easily be extended to other NLP tasks where test suites can be used such as evaluating (one-shot) dialogue systems.