Issue #8 – Is Neural MT on par with human translation?
05 Sep18
Issue #8 – Is Neural MT on par with human translation?
Author: Dr. John Tinsley, CEO @ Iconic
The next few articles of the Neural MT Weekly will deal with the topic of quality and evaluation of machine translation. Since the advent of Neural MT, developments have moved fast, and we have seen quality expectation levels rise, in line with a number of striking proclamations about performance. Early claims of “bridging the gap between human and machine translation” stoked a lot of discussion in the translation community, but the recent bold claim of “achieving human parity” by Hassan et al. (2018) raised a lot of eyebrows.
This resulted in two teams of leading MT academic researchers taking a closer look at the latter claim, with some interesting findings. Let’s see what they discovered…
“Attaining the unattainable?”
In their paper, “Attaining the Unattainable? Reassessing Claims of Human Parity in Neural Machine Translation”, Toral et al. (2018) challenged three aspects of the evaluation that were not taken into account by Hassan, et al. (2018), namely:
- The language of the source side of the test documents;
- The proficiency of the evaluators;
- The availability of context when
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