Crowdsourcing for Evaluating Machine Translation Quality

The recent popularity of machine translation has increased the demand for the evaluation of translations. However, the traditional evaluation approach, manual checking by a bilingual professional, is too expensive and too slow. In this study, we confirm the feasibility of crowdsourcing by analyzing the accuracy of crowdsourcing translation evaluations. We compare crowdsourcing scores to professional scores with regard to three metrics: translation-score, sentence-score, and system-score. A Chinese to English translation evaluation task was designed using around the NTCIR-9 PATENT parallel corpus with the goal being 5-range evaluations of adequacy and fluency. The experiment shows that the average score of crowdsource workers well matches professional evaluation results. The system-score comparison strongly indicates that crowdsourcing can be used to find the best translation system given the input of 10 source sentence.