2022/09/15 by Terry Yue Zhuo, Qiongkai Xu, Zhuo, Terry Yue +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.07351
openalex publication_date 2022/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Automatic evaluation on low-resource language translation suffers from a deficiency of parallel corpora. Round-trip translation could be served as a clever and straightforward technique to alleviate the requirement of the parallel evaluation corpus. However, there was an observation of obscure correlations between the evaluation scores by forward and round-trip translations in the era of statistical machine translation (SMT). In this paper, we report the surprising finding that round-trip translation can be used for automatic evaluation without the references. Firstly, our revisit on the round-trip translation in SMT evaluation unveils that its long-standing misunderstanding is essentially caused by copying mechanism. After removing copying mechanism in SMT, round-trip translation scores can appropriately reflect the forward translation performance. Then, we demonstrate the rectification is overdue as round-trip translation could benefit multiple machine translation evaluation tasks. To be more specific, round-trip translation could be used i) to predict corresponding forward translation scores; ii) to improve the performance of the recently advanced quality estimation model; and iii) to identify adversarial competitors in shared tasks via cross-system verification.