| Challenge: | Several neural-based metrics have been proposed to evaluate machine translation quality, but they are trained on noisy, biased and scarce human judgements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate machine translation quality using point estimates . they combine COMET framework with Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well across multiple language pairs and with references. |
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| Challenge: | Trainable evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) exhibit strong correlation with human judgements, but they are often hard to interpret and might produce unreliable scores under noisy or out-of-domain data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles to quantify uncertainty in machine translation and assess their ability to target different sources of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. |
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Difficulty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Current MT evaluation measures pay the same attention to each sentence component . in real-world examinations, the questions vary in difficulty and weightings . |
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Measuring Uncertainty in Translation Quality Evaluation (TQE) (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated tools are not good enough to evaluate translation quality . existing tools are often accused of having low reliability and agreement . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a method to accurately estimate the confidence intervals depending on the sample size of the translated text. |
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Test-time Adaptation for Machine Translation Evaluation by Uncertainty Minimization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | evaluators of machine translation systems often use text-based metrics to evaluate performance . however, these metrics lack semantic-level information and exhibit poor correlation with human ratings . authors propose a method to reduce inference bias of neural metrics in out-of-distribution data . |
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Unsupervised Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation (2020.tacl-1)
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Marina Fomicheva, Shuo Sun, Lisa Yankovskaya, Frédéric Blain, Francisco Guzmán, Mark Fishel, Nikolaos Aletras, Vishrav Chaudhary, Lucia Specia
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The Inside Story: Towards Better Understanding of Machine Translation Neural Evaluation Metrics (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Neural metrics for machine translation evaluation are considered "black boxes" lexical overlap-based metrics are popular for evaluation of translation systems and algorithms . |
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Quality-Aware Decoding for Neural Machine Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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Patrick Fernandes, António Farinhas, Ricardo Rei, José G. C. de Souza, Perez Ogayo, Graham Neubig, Andre Martins
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Uncertainty Quantification for Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models can reproduce existing social inequalities but cannot be reduced. |
| Approach: | They propose that models should maintain uncertainty when input is ambiguous to avoid reinforcing biases. |
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COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Historically, metrics for evaluating the quality of machine translation (MT) have relied on basic, lexical-level features such as counting the number of matching n-grams between the MT hypothesis and the reference translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural framework for training multilingual machine translation evaluation models which exploits human judgements to obtain new state-of-the-art levels of correlation with MT quality. |
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Refined Assessment for Translation Evaluation: Rethinking Machine Translation Evaluation in the Era of Human-Level Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dmitry Popov, Vladislav Negodin, Ekaterina Enikeeva, Iana Matrosova, Nikolay Karpachev, Max Ryabinin
| Challenge: | Currently, traditional evaluation methods struggle to detect subtle translation errors. |
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