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Edit distances with block movements and error rate confidence estimates

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Machine Translation

Abstract

We present two evaluation measures for Machine Translation (MT), which are defined as error rates extended by block moves. In contrast to Ter, these measures are constrained in a way that allows for an exact calculation in polynomial time. We then investigate three methods to estimate the standard error of error rates, and compare them to bootstrap estimates. We assess the correlation of our proposed measures with human judgment using data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2008 MetricsMATR workshop.

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Correspondence to Gregor Leusch.

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Leusch, G., Ney, H. Edit distances with block movements and error rate confidence estimates. Machine Translation 23, 129–140 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-009-9063-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-009-9063-8

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