What do post-editors correct? A fine-grained analysis of SMT and NMT errors

Álvarez-Vidal, Sergi; Oliver, Antoni; Badia i Cardús, Antoni

doi:https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/tradumatica.286

What do post-editors correct? A fine-grained analysis of SMT and NMT errors

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Álvarez-Vidal S, Oliver A, Badia T. What do post-editors correct? A fine-grained analysis of SMT and NMT errors. Revista Tradumàtica. 2021;(19):131-47. DOI: 10.5565/rev/tradumatica.286

Abstract

The recent improvements in neural MT (NMT) have driven a shift from statistical MT (SMT) to NMT. However, to assess the usefulness of MT models for post-editing (PE) and have a detailed insight of the output they produce, we need to analyse the most frequent errors and how they affect the task. We present a pilot study of a fine-grained analysis of MT errors based on post-editors corrections for an English to Spanish medical text translated with SMT and NMT. We use the MQM taxonomy to compare the two MT models and have a categorized classification of the errors produced. Even though results show a great variation among posteditors’ corrections, for this language combination fewer errors are corrected by post-editors in the NMT output. NMT also produces fewer accuracy errors and errors that are less critical.