The METEOR Automatic Machine
Translation Evaluation System

Alon Lavie
Abhaya Agarwal

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Download METEOR

Please send any questions and bug reports to Abhaya Agarwal at abhayaa AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu.

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About METEOR

METEOR is a system that automatically evaluates the output of machine translation engines by comparing to them to (one or more) reference translations. For a given pair of hypothesis and reference strings, the evaluation proceeds in a sequence of stages, with different criteria being used at each stage to find and score unigram matches. By default, at the first stage all exact matches are detected between the two strings, while in the second stage the words not matched in the first stage are stemmed using the Porter stemmer and then matches are found between these stemmed words. For further details, please refer Banerjee & Lavie,2005 .

The matching system is written in Perl, and each matching stage is implemented as a separate Perl module. In addition to the two default matching modules (exact matching and stemmed matching), a WordNet based stemmed matching module and a WordNet based synonym matching module are also provided with this distribution. METEOR can be run with the default modules, or the user can override the defaults, and use one or more of the given modules in any order of preference. Further, the user can write his own matching module and plug it into the generic matching system.

METEOR's input file format is exactly the same as those of Bleu and NIST's Machine Translation Evaluation system. Thus all translation data that can be evaluated using Bleu (such as the TIDES data) can also be directly evaluated using METEOR. Starting from version 0.5 METEOR can take as input n-best lists and score them. You can read more details about the current version of METEOR here.

References


This page last modified on: 8th May, 2007.