Designing a Frame-Semantic Machine Translation Evaluation Metric

Abstract

We propose a metric for machine translation evaluation based on frame semantics which does not require the use of reference translations or human corrections, but is aimed at comparing original and translated output directly. The metric is developed on the basis of an existing manual frame-semantic annotation of a parallel corpus with an English original and a Brazilian Portuguese and a German translation. We discuss implications of our metric design, including the potential of scaling it for multiple languages.