Management of Large Annotation Projects Involving Multiple Human Judges: a Case Study of GALE Machine Translation Post-editing

Managing large groups of human judges to perform any annotation task is a challenge. Linguistic Data Consortium coordinated the creation of manual machine translation post-editing results for the DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploration Program. Machine translation is one of three core technology components for GALE, which includes an annual MT evaluation administered by National Institute of Standards and Technology. Among the training and test data LDC creates for the GALE program are gold standard translations for system evaluation. The GALE machine translation system evaluation metric is edit distance, measured by HTER (human translation edit rate), which calculates the minimum number of changes required for highly-trained human editors to correct MT output so that it has the same meaning as the reference translation. LDC has been responsible for overseeing the post-editing process for GALE. We describe some of the accomplishments and challenges of completing the post-editing effort, including developing a new web-based annotation workflow system, and recruiting and training human judges for the task. In addition, we suggest that the workflow system developed for post-editing could be ported efficiently to other annotation efforts. * This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this paper does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.