Evaluation of a Machine Translation System for Low Resource Languages: METIS-II

Abstract

In this paper we describe the METIS-II system and its evaluation on each of the language pairs: Dutch, German, Greek, and Spanish to English. The METIS-II system envisaged developing a data-driven approach in which no parallel corpus is required and in which no full parser or extensive rule sets are needed. We describe the evaluation on a development test set and on a test set taken from Europarl, and compare our results with SYSTRAN. We also provide some further analysis, namely researching the impact of the number and source of the reference translations and analysing the results according to test text type. The results are expectably lower for the METIS system, but not at an unattainable distance from a mature system like SYSTRAN.