TRANSLATION ERROR RATE (TER) 0.10.0
Matthew Snover
Shuguang Wang
Spyros Matsoukas
Copyright (C) 2007 BBN Technologies and University of Maryland
TER contains a Java program for computing the translation error rate, which is an error metric for machine translation that messures the number of edits required to change a system output into one of the references. More details about the translation error rate can be found at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~snover/tercom/
TER parses input reference and hypothesis files as SGML(NIST format), XML, or Trans. Both reference and hypothesis files should be in the same formats.
The code has been compiled into an executable jar file: tercom.jar
The source files are also provided in the src/ directory. TERtest is the main executable class.
References to TER should cite:
Matthew Snover, Bonnie Dorr, Richard Schwartz, Linnea Micciulla, and John Makhoul, "A Study of Translation Edit Rate with Targeted Human Annotation," Proceedings of Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, 2006.
Currently, the following options are supported:
-N normalization, optional, default is no.
-s case sensitivity, optional, default is insensitive
-P no punctuations, default is with punctuations.
-A Asian language support for -N and -P, optional, default is without.
-K remove brackets around HTML-style tags, optional, default is to keep
-r reference file path, required.
-h hypothesis file path, required.
-o output formats, optional, default are all formats.
Valid formats include "ter", "xml", "sum", "sum_nbest" and "pra".
"ter", plain text file contains four columns: chunkid, numerrs, numwrds, ter%
"xml", XML format with detailed alignment for each word
"pra", plain text with alignment details, simpler than that of tercom_v6b.
"pra_more", identical to pra output as tercom_v6b.
"sum", same summary output as that of tercom_v6b.
"sum_nbest", same nbest summary output as that of tercom_v6b.
-n output name prefix, optional, no output will be generated if it is not set.
-b beam width, optional, default is 20.
-S translation span prefix, optional, this option only works with single reference.
-a alternative reference path, optional, this file will be only used to compute the reference length.
-d maximum shift distance, optional, default is 50 words.
- Use default values for all options and output in all formats.
$ java -jar tercom.jar -r <ref_file> -h <hyp_file> -n <output_prefix>- Enable normalization and case sensitivity, and set the beam width to 10.
$ java -jar tercom.jar -N -s -b 10 -r <ref_file> -h <hyp_file> -n <output_prefix>- Same as above, but split most Chinese and Japanese text appearing in the output down to the character level.
$ java -jar tercom.jar -N -A -s -b 10 -r <ref_file> -h <hyp_file> -n <output_prefix>- Output only summary output.
$ java -jar tercom.jar -r <ref_file> -h <hyp_file> -o xml -n <output_prefix>Sample Data and output is provided in the sample-data directory.
sample-data/hyp.txt contains the hypothesis text sample-data/ref.txt contains the reference text sample-data/out.txt contains the output of running the following command
cd sample-data/ java -jar ../tercom.jar -r ref.txt -h hyp.txt > out.txt
The primary classes of the tercom computation code are described below:
TERtest - The command-line UI for the code. Its usage is described above.
TERcalc - This does all of the work calculating TER. All of the methods are static, so no instantiations should ever be made. To calculate TER, call: TERcalc.TER(String a, String b). This tokenizes and then runs TER. It returns a TERalignment object. If the input is pretokenized (or tokenized and then converted to another type, such as Integer (which give better performance)), then you can call TER(Comparable[], Comparable[]). If you want to use a different scoring module (see TERcost class), then use the functions TER(Comparable[], Comparable[], TERcost) or TER(String, String, TERcost).
TERshift - This is a tiny storage class, which stores the information for indiviual shifts.
TERalignment - This contains the output of TER. Some processing might be needed to make it as pretty as TERcom pra output.
TERcost - This class is used to determine the cost of insertions, deletions, substitutions, matches, and shifts. The base class gives all edits a cost of 1, and matches a cost of 0. If a researcher wants to experiment with alternative cost functions, or cost matrices, then a new child class of TERcost should be made that calculates those cost functions. This can be passed in as the third arguement to the TER function of TERcalc. It should be noted that this version of the code only does word to word cost matrices (not phrasal matrices), and that all costs must be in the range of 0.0 to 1.0.
TERpara - This class is used to parse the command arguments given to TERtest.