Quality Estimation without Human-labeled Data

EACL 2021 · Yi-Lin Tuan, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzmán, Lucia Specia ·

Quality estimation aims to measure the quality of translated content without access to a reference translation. This is crucial for machine translation systems in real-world scenarios where high-quality translation is needed. While many approaches exist for quality estimation, they are based on supervised machine learning requiring costly human labelled data. As an alternative, we propose a technique that does not rely on examples from human-annotators and instead uses synthetic training data. We train off-the-shelf architectures for supervised quality estimation on our synthetic data and show that the resulting models achieve comparable performance to models trained on human-annotated data, both for sentence and word-level prediction.