TY - JOUR T1 - A study of translation edit rate with targeted human annotation JF - Proceedings of Association for Machine Translation in the Americas Y1 - 2006 A1 - Snover,M. A1 - Dorr, Bonnie J A1 - Schwartz,R. A1 - Micciulla,L. A1 - Makhoul,J. AB - We examine a new, intuitive measurefor evaluating machine-translation output that avoids the knowledge intensiveness of more meaning-based approaches, and the labor-intensiveness of human judg- ments. Translation Edit Rate (TER) mea- sures the amount of editing that a hu- man would have to perform to change a system output so it exactly matches a reference translation. We show that the single-reference variant of TER correlates as well with human judgments of MT quality as the four-reference variant of BLEU. We also define a human-targeted TER (or HTER) and show that it yields higher correlations with human judgments than BLEU—even when BLEU is given human-targeted references. Our results in- dicate that HTER correlates with human judgments better than HMETEOR and that the four-reference variants of TER and HTER correlate with human judg- ments as well as—or better than—a sec- ond human judgment does. ER -