Measuring Machine Translation Errors in New Domains

Abstract

We develop two techniques for analyzing the effect of porting a machine translation system to a new domain. One is a macro-level analysis that measures how domain shift affects corpus-level evaluation; the second is a micro-level analysis for word-level errors. We apply these methods to understand what happens when a Parliament-trained phrase-based machine translation system is applied in four very different domains: news, medical texts, scientific articles and movie subtitles. We present quantitative and qualitative experiments that highlight opportunities for future research in domain adaptation for machine translation.