Is the output grammatical or well-formed in the target language? Using an interlingua should be helpful in this regard, because with a fixed interlingua one should be able to write a grammatical mapping to the target language from the interlingua. … Read More
Is the system adaptive to colloquialism, argot or slang? The French language has many rules for creating words in the speech and writing of popular culture. Two such rules are: (a) The reverse spelling of words such as femme to … Read More
The Word error rate (WER) is a metric based on the Levenshtein distance, where the Levenshtein distance works at the character level, WER works at the word level. It was originally used for measuring the performance of speech recognition systems, … Read More
The article below give objective criteria for evaluating the usability of machine translation software output. Stationarity or Canonical Form Do repeated translations converge on a single expression in both languages? I.e. does the translation method show stationarity or produce a … Read More
Non-Computational Approaches In the field of library science, language identification is important for categorizing materials. As librarians often have to categorize materials which are in languages they are not familiar with, they sometimes rely on tables of frequent words and … Read More
Language identification is the process of determining which natural language given content is in. Traditionally, identification of written language – as practiced, for instance, in library science – has relied on manually identifying frequent words and letters known to be … Read More
In the context of this article, a metric will be understood as a measurement. A metric for the evaluation of machine translation output is a measurement of the quality of the output. The quality of a translation is inherently subjective, … Read More
There are now many software programs for translating natural language, several of them online, such as: SYSTRAN, which powers Yahoo’s Babel Fish Promt, which powers online translation services at Voila.fr and Orange.fr Although no system provides the holy grail of … Read More
Word-sense disambiguation concerns finding a suitable translation when a word can have more than one meaning. The problem was first raised in the 1950s by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.[1] He pointed out that without a “universal encyclopedia”, a machine would never be … Read More
As part of the Human Language Technologies Program, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created a methodology to evaluate machine translation systems, and continues to perform evaluations based on this methodology. The evaluation programme was instigated in 1991, and continues … Read More
