Reducing Human Assessment of Machine Translation Quality to Binary Classifiers

This paper presents a method to predict human assessments of machine translation (MT) quality based on the combination of binary classifiers using a coding matrix. The multiclass categorization problem is reduced to a set of binary problems that are solved using standard classification learning algorithms trained on the results of multiple automatic evaluation metrics. Experimental results using a large-scale humanannotated evaluation corpus show that the decomposition into binary classifiers achieves higher classification accuracies than the multiclass categorization problem. In addition, the proposed method achieves a higher correlation with human judgments on the sentence-level compared to standard automatic evaluation measures.