Evaluation of Machine Translation Errors in English and Iraqi Arabic

Sherri Condon, Dan Parvaz, John Aberdeen, Christy Doran, Andrew Freeman, Marwan Awad


Abstract
Errors in machine translations of English-Iraqi Arabic dialogues were analyzed at two different points in the systems? development using HTER methods to identify errors and human annotations to refine TER annotations. The analyses were performed on approximately 100 translations into each language from 4 translation systems collected at two annual evaluations. Although the frequencies of errors in the more mature systems were lower, the proportions of error types exhibited little change. Results include high frequencies of pronoun errors in translations to English, high frequencies of subject person inflection in translations to Iraqi Arabic, similar frequencies of word order errors in both translation directions, and very low frequencies of polarity errors. The problems with many errors can be generalized as the need to insert lexemes not present in the source or vice versa, which includes errors in multi-word expressions. Discourse context will be required to resolve some problems with deictic elements like pronouns.
Anthology ID:
L10-1065
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/106_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sherri Condon, Dan Parvaz, John Aberdeen, Christy Doran, Andrew Freeman, and Marwan Awad. 2010. Evaluation of Machine Translation Errors in English and Iraqi Arabic. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation of Machine Translation Errors in English and Iraqi Arabic (Condon et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/106_Paper.pdf