A Simple Automatic MT Evaluation Metric

This paper describes a simple evaluation metric for MT which attempts to overcome the well-known deficits of the standard BLEU metric from a slightly different an-gle. It employes Levenshtein’s edit dis-tance for establishing alignment between the MT output and the reference transla-tion in order to reflect the morphological properties of highly inflected languages. It also incorporates a very simple measure expressing the differences in the word or-der. The paper also includes evaluation on the data from the previous SMT workshop for several language pairs.