Objective evaluation of second language learner’s translation proficiency using statistical translation measures

Authors

  • Hajime Tsubaki Doshisha University, Japan Author
  • Keiji Yasuda Doshisha University, Japan Author
  • Hirofumi Yamamoto Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan Author
  • Yoshinori Sagisaka Waseda University, Japan Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0055/000114

Keywords:

objective proficiency evaluation, word n-gram, translation probability

Abstract

For objective evaluation of a second-language learner’s translation proficiency, we tested two measures commonly used in statistical machine translation. One is the word $n$-gram probability of a target language to measure the likelihood of translated sentences in that language. The other is the translation probability from source-language sentences to target-language sentences to measure translation accuracy between the sentence pairs. The subjective proficiency scores of Japanese learners were compared with these objective measures extracted from the English sentences they translated. Statistical analysis showed no correlation for the word $n$-gram probabilities, but a high correlation for the translation probabilities, which suggests their usefulness for the objective evaluation of learners' translation proficiency.

References

Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T. and Zhu, W. J. 2002. BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002), pp. 311-318. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Yasuda, K., Sumita, E., Yamamoto, S., Yanagida, M., Maekawa, K. and Sugaya, F. 2003. A proposal for automatically gauging of English language proficiency. IPSJ SIG Technical Report, 2003-NL-155, 65-70.

Brown, P. F., Della Pietra, V. J., Della Pietra, S. A. and Mercer, R. L. 1993. The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics, 19(2), 263-311.

Takezawa, T., Sumita, E., Sugaya, F., Yamamoto, H. and Yamamoto, S. 2002. Toward a broad-coverage bilingual corpus for speech translation of travel conversations in the real world. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002), pp. 147-152. Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain.

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Published

01-01-2008

How to Cite

Objective evaluation of second language learner’s translation proficiency using statistical translation measures. (2008). Linguistic Proceedings Series, 2(1), 217-220. https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0055/000114

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