Source-Free MT Evaluation Is Not MT Evaluation
Reference-based metrics remain the standard choice in machine translation evaluation, partly because quality estimation methods often correlate less well with human judgments. As a result, source-free, reference-based evaluation has become the practical norm, even though it is unfaithful to the definition of translation adequacy and unfair to systems whose outputs preserve the source meaning while differing from the reference. This paper argues that adequacy must be judged with respect to the source. A reference is only one possible rendering of the source and may introduce bias, under-specification, or errors. We further argue that source-reference-hypothesis evaluation is fair only when...
| Authors | Baban Gain, Ramakrishna Appicharla, Asif Ekbal |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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