Fast, cheap, and creative

Abstract

Manual evaluation of translation quality is generally thought to be excessively time consuming and expensive. We explore a fast and inexpensive way of doing it using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay small sums to a large number of non-expert annotators. For $10 we redundantly recreate judgments from a WMT08 translation task. We find that when combined non-expert judgments have a high-level of agreement with the existing gold-standard judgments of machine translation quality, and correlate more strongly with expert judgments than Bleu does. We go on to show that Mechanical Turk can be used to calculate human-mediated translation edit rate (HTER), to conduct reading comprehension experiments with machine translation, and to create high quality reference translations.