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Empirical Analysis of Performance of MT Systems and Its Metrics for English to Bengali: A Black Box-Based Approach

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Intelligent Systems, Technologies and Applications

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1353))

Abstract

There are numerous use cases of machine translation (MT) systems. Therefore, it has become very important to evaluate the performance of MT which can help researchers design a robust and reliable machine translation system. Although there are number of automatic MT evaluation metrics available nowadays, most of these fail to produce correct score. In this paper, we shall describe the most recent framework in MT industry that is Neural Machine Translation, and our approach is to test the performances of most popular translators—Google Translate and Microsoft’s Bing translator. We use language pairs English and Bengali for our detail analysis. Experiments are performed to translate English to Bengali. Bengali is a resource poor and one of the most widely spoken language in Indian subcontinent. Unlike glass box approach, where the performance of the MT systems are tried to enhance by adjusting various hyper parameters, we will be using black box approach, i.e., evaluating the performance of the already built systems. Beside performance analysis of the two translators, our main focus is to evaluate the performance of one of the very popular automatic evaluators Bilingual Under Study (BLEU) and some other automatic evaluation metrics in our work. This paper aims to measure the performance of BLEU and other automatic metrics during English to Bengali translation process by conducting survey with the help of questionnaires distributed among twenty people having moderate to high linguistic expertise on both the languages. Their responses are collected, and mean score is calculated which we have considered as human score (human judgement). BLEU and scores generated by other automatic metrics are used and compared their performance with human-generated score. A correlation is measured between human score and other metrics with Pearson correlation coefficient. Finally, some important observations are reported for this language pairs.

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Datta, G., Joshi, N., Gupta, K. (2021). Empirical Analysis of Performance of MT Systems and Its Metrics for English to Bengali: A Black Box-Based Approach. In: Paprzycki, M., Thampi, S.M., Mitra, S., Trajkovic, L., El-Alfy, ES.M. (eds) Intelligent Systems, Technologies and Applications. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1353. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0730-1_24

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