UHH submission to the WMT17 metrics shared task

Abstract

In this paper the UHH submission to the WMT17 Metrics Shared Task is presented, which is based on sequence and tree kernel functions applied to the reference and candidate translations. In addition we also explore the effect of applying the kernel functions on the source sentence and a back-translation of the MT output, but also on the pair composed of the candidate translation and a pseudo-reference of the source segment. The newly proposed metric was evaluated using the data from WMT16, with the results demonstrating a high correlation with human judgments.