mixcoder / MT-ComparEval

Tool for comparison and evaluation of machine translation.

MT-ComparEval

MT-ComparEval is a tool for comparison and evaluation of machine translations. It allows users to compare translations according to several criteria, such as:

• automatic metrics of machine translation quality computed either on whole documents or single sentences
• quality comparison of single sentence translation by highlighting confirmed, improving and worsening n-grams
• summaries of the most improving and worsening n-grams for the whole document.

MT-ComparEval also plots a chart with absolute differences of metrics computed on single sentences and a chart with values obtained from paired bootstrap resampling. MT-ComparEval is distributed under Apache 2.0 license with an exception of Highcharts.js library which is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.

Try it online before installing on your server

• http://wmt.ufal.cz: all systems from the WMT 2014–2017
• http://mt-compareval.ufal.cz: upload and analyze your translations

Papers

When using MT-ComparEval please cite:

• Ondřej Klejch, Eleftherios Avramidis, Aljoscha Burchardt, Martin Popel: MT-ComparEval: Graphical evaluation interface for Machine Translation development. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, No. 104, 2015, pp. 63–74.

For a user-focused show-case study explaining most of the features, see:

• Roman Sudarikov, Martin Popel, Ondrej Bojar, Aljoscha Burchardt, Ondřej Klejch: Using MT-ComparEval. LREC 2016 MT-Eval Workshop. See slides and a poster.

Installation

In order to be able to run MT-ComparEval several dependencies have to be installed. Namely, PHP version 5.4 and Sqlite 3. On Ubuntu 14.04 these dependencies can be installed with the following commands:

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 php5-cli php5-sqlite curl

On Ubuntu 16.04 use:

sudo apt install sqlite3 php7.0-cli php7.0-sqlite3 curl php7.0-mbstring

Then the application can be installed with the following command:

bash bin/install.sh

During the installation you will be probably asked to enter GitHub OAuth token. Just follow the instructions (open the url in your browser, generate the token and enter it).

Running MT-ComparEval

To start MT-ComparEval two processes have to be run:

• bin/server.sh which starts the application server on the address localhost:8080 (you can can check/adapt app/config/config.neon first to set the main title, set of metrics etc. See the default config.)
• bin/watcher.sh which monitors folder data for new experiments and tasks (the data folder must exist before you run bin/watcher.sh.)

Structure of the data folder

Folder data contains folders with experiments (e.g. EN-CS-WMT15), which contains subfolders with tasks for each experiment (e.g. MOSES). For example:

data/
├─ EN-CS-WMT15/
│  ├─ source.txt
│  ├─ reference.txt
│  ├─ CHIMERA/
│  │  └─ translation.txt
│  └─ NEURAL-MT/
│     └─ translation.txt
└─ EN-DE-WMT15/
   ├─ source.txt
   ├─ reference.txt
   ├─ MOSES/
   │  └─ translation.txt
   └─ NEURAL-MT/
      └─ translation.txt

Each folder corresponds to one experiment and it should contain the following files:

• source.txt - a plain text file with sentences in source language (one sentence per line).
• reference.txt - a plain text file with reference translations (in target language).
• config.neon - (optionally) a configuration file with the following structure:

name: Name of the experiment
description: "Description of the experiment\n can be multiline"
source: source.txt
reference: reference.txt

See http://ne-on.org/ for the syntax of neon files. The source and reference needs to be defined only if you you choose non-default file names (not source.txt and reference.txt).

Individual machine translations called tasks are then stored in subfolders with the following files:

• translation.txt - a plain text file with translated sentences
• config.neon - (optionally) a configuration file with the following structure:

name: Name of the task
description: Description of the task
translation: translation.txt
precompute_ngrams: true

API to create experiments and tasks

A curl command to create an experiment:

curl -X POST -F "name=experiment name" -F "description=description" -F "source=@source.txt" -F "reference=@reference.txt" http://localhost:8080/api/experiments/upload

A curl command to create a task:

curl -X POST -F "name=task name" -F "description=description" -F "experiment_id=1" -F "translation=@translation.txt" http://localhost:8080/api/tasks/upload

For deleting experiments via API use api/experiments/delete/<id>.

How to remove a task manually

• Retrieve the experiment id from frontend. When you open an experiment you can see the id in the URL.
• Stop watcher
• Remove task from folder data/.../ (or if you want to reimport the task after watcher is restarted, delete the hidden files .imported and .notimported)
• Find out task id, e.g. sqlite3 storage/database "SELECT id, name FROM tasks WHERE experiments_id=XYZ";
• Delete task: sqlite3 storage/database "sqlite3 storage/database "DELETE FROM tasks WHERE id=ABC";"
• Restart watcher