The TALP-UPC Approach to System Selection: Asiya Features and Pairwise Classification Using Random Forests

This paper describes the TALP-UPC participation in the WMT’13 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). Our participation is reduced to task 1.2 on System Selection. We used a broad set of features (86 for German-to-English and 97 for English-to-Spanish) ranging from standard QE features to features based on pseudo-references and semantic similarity. We approached system selection by means of pairwise ranking decisions. For that, we learned Random Forest classifiers especially tailored for the problem. Evaluation at development time showed considerably good results in a cross-validation experiment, with Kendall’s τ values around 0.30. The results on the test set dropped significantly, raising different discussions to be taken into account.