Automatic evaluation of Chinese translation output: Word-level or character-level?

Abstract

Word is usually adopted as the smallest unit in most tasks of Chinese language processing. However, for automatic evaluation of the quality of Chinese translation output when translating from other languages, either a word-level approach or a character-level approach is possible. So far, there has been no detailed study to compare the correlations of these two approaches with human assessment. In this paper, we compare word-level metrics with characterlevel metrics on the submitted output of English- to-Chinese translation systems in the IWSLT'08 CT-EC and NIST'08 EC tasks. Our experimental results reveal that character-level metrics correlate with human assessment better than word-level metrics. Our analysis suggests several key reasons behind this finding. © 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.