UHH submission to the WMT17 quality estimation shared task

Abstract

The field of Quality Estimation (QE) has the goal to provide automatic methods for the evaluation of Machine Translation (MT), that do not require reference translations in their computation. We present our submission to the sentence level WMT17 Quality Estimation Shared Task. It combines tree and sequence kernels for predicting the post-editing effort of the target sentence. The kernels exploit both the source and target sentences, but also a back-translation of the candidate translation. The evaluation results show that the kernel approach combined with the baseline features brings substantial improvement over the baseline system.