DiP Benchmark Tests: Evaluation Benchmarks for Discourse Phenomena in MT
Authors: Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Barbara Rychalska, Shafiq Joty, Dominika Basaj
Keywords: machine translation, discourse, evaluation, benchmark, testsets, leaderboard
Abstract: Despite increasing instances of machine translation (MT) systems including extrasentential context information, the evidence for translation quality improvement is sparse, especially for discourse phenomena. Popular metrics like BLEU are not expressive or sensitive enough to capture quality improvements or drops that are minor in size but significant in perception. We introduce the first of their kind MT benchmark testsets that aim to track and hail improvements across four main discourse phenomena: anaphora, lexical consistency, coherence and readability, and discourse connective translation. We also introduce evaluation methods for these tasks, and evaluate several competitive baseline MT systems on the curated datasets. Surprisingly, we find that the complex context-aware models that we test do not improve discourse-related translations consistently across languages and phenomena. Our evaluation benchmark is available as a leaderboard at <dipbenchmark1.github.io>.