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 Estimation (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 sentence-level QE system re-uses the word level predictions of the word-level QE system. We experimented with different learning methods and observe improvements over the baseline system for wordlevel 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.