Correlations of perceived post-editing effort with measurements of actual effort

• Published in: Machine translation 2015-12, Vol.29 (3/4), p.267-284
• Main Authors: Moorkens, Joss, O'Brien, Sharon, da Silva, Igor A. L., de Lima Fonseca, Norma B., Alves, Fabio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• ISSN: 0922-6567; 1573-0573
• DOI: 10.1007/s10590-015-9175-2

Human rating of predicted post-editing effort is a common activity and has been used to train confidence estimation models. However, the correlation between human ratings and actual post-editing effort is under-measured. Moreover, the impact of presenting effort indicators in a post-editing user interface on actual post-editing effort has hardly been researched. In this study, ratings of perceived post-editing effort are tested for correlations with actual temporal, technical and cognitive post-editing effort. In addition, the impact on post-editing effort of the presentation of post-editing effort indicators in the user interface is also tested. The language pair involved in this study is English-Brazilian Portuguese. Our findings, based on a small sample, suggest that there is little agreement between raters for predicted post-editing effort and that the correlations between actual post-editing effort and predicted effort are only moderate, and thus an inefficient basis for MT confidence estimation. Moreover, the presentation of post-editing effort indicators in the user interface appears not to impact on actual post-editing effort.