Contextual bitext-derived paraphrases in automatic MT evaluation

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel method for deriving paraphrases during automatic MT evaluation using only the source and reference texts, which are necessary for the evaluation, and word and phrase alignment software. Using target language paraphrases produced through word and phrase alignment a number of alternative reference sentences are constructed automatically for each candidate translation. The method produces lexical and lowlevel syntactic paraphrases that are relevant to the domain in hand, does not use external knowledge resources, and can be combined with a variety of automatic MT evaluation system.