Paper ID: 2305.02300

Evaluating the Efficacy of Length-Controllable Machine Translation

Hao Cheng, Meng Zhang, Weixuan Wang, Liangyou Li, Qun Liu, Zhihua Zhang

Length-controllable machine translation is a type of constrained translation. It aims to contain the original meaning as much as possible while controlling the length of the translation. We can use automatic summarization or machine translation evaluation metrics for length-controllable machine translation, but this is not necessarily suitable and accurate. This work is the first attempt to evaluate the automatic metrics for length-controllable machine translation tasks systematically. We conduct a rigorous human evaluation on two translation directions and evaluate 18 summarization or translation evaluation metrics. We find that BLEURT and COMET have the highest correlation with human evaluation and are most suitable as evaluation metrics for length-controllable machine translation.

Submitted: May 3, 2023