Evaluation of machine translation and its evaluation

Evaluation of MT evaluation measures is limited by inconsistent human judgment data. Nonetheless, machine translation can be evaluated using the well-known measures precision, recall, and their average, the F-measure. The unigram-based F-measure has significantly higher correlation with human judgments than recently proposed alternatives. More importantly, this standard measure has an intuitive graphical interpretation, which can facilitate insight into how MT systems might be improved. The relevant software is publicly available from http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/GTM/.