UGENT-LT3 SCATE system for machine translation quality estimation

Abstract

This paper describes the submission of the UGENT-LT3 SCATE system to the WMT15 Shared Task on Quality Estima-tion (QE), viz. English-Spanish word and sentence-level QE. We conceived QE as a supervised Machine Learning (ML) problem and designed additional features and combined these with the baseline feature set to estimate quality. The sen-tence-level QE system re-uses the word level predictions of the word-level QE system. We experimented with different learning methods and observe improve-ments over the baseline system for word-level QE with the use of the new features and by combining learning methods into ensembles. For sentence-level QE we show that using a single feature based on word-level predictions can perform better than the baseline system and using this in combination with additional features led to further improvements in performance