Multiple-Translation Arabic (MTA) Part 2
| Item Name: | Multiple-Translation Arabic (MTA) Part 2 |
| Author(s): | Xiaoyi Ma |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2005T05 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-328-3 |
| ISLRN: | 136-463-995-609-6 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/6a17-c826 |
| Release Date: | February 15, 2005 |
| Member Year(s): | 2005 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Text |
| Data Source(s): | newswire |
| Project(s): | GALE, TIDES |
| Application(s): | cross-lingual information retrieval, language teaching, machine translation |
| Language(s): | English, Standard Arabic |
| Language ID(s): | eng, arb |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Ma, Xiaoyi. Multiple-Translation Arabic (MTA) Part 2 LDC2005T05. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2005. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
Multiple-Translation Arabic (MTA) Part 2 was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains approximately 15,000 Arabic words of source news text along with seven English translation sets, four by humans and three by machine translation (MT) systems, and assessments of the MT.
To support the development of automatic means for evaluating translation quality, LDC was sponsored to solicit four sets of human translations for a single set of Arabic source materials. LDC was also asked to produce translations from various commercial-off-the-shelf-systems (COTS, including commercial MT systems and ones available on the Internet). This corpus contains two sets of COTS outputs and one output set from a TIDES 2003 MT Evaluation participant, which is representative for the state-of-the-art research systems.
The goal of this effort is to evaluate the quality of TIDES research, human translation teams, and COTS systems. To determine if automatic evaluation systems such as BLEU track human assessment, LDC also performed human assessment on the two COTS outputs and the TIDES research system. The corpus includes the assessment results for one of the two COTS systems, the assessment result for the TIDES research system, and the specifications used for conducting the assessments.
This corpus represents the second part of a collection of multiple-translation Arabic. The first part is available from LDC as Multiple-Translation Arabic (MTA) Part 1 (LDC2003T18).
Data
All source data was drawn from January and February 2003. Here's a breakdown of the data amounts by source contained in this corpus:
| Source | Abbreviation | Stories | Words |
| Xinhua News Service | Xinhua | 50 | 7,551 |
| Agence France Presse | AFP | 50 | 7,528 |
| Totals | 100 | 15,079 | |
There are 100 source files and 700 translation files. The story selection from the two newswire collections was controlled by story length: all selected stories contain between 700 and 1,500 Arabic characters.
The MT outputs were evaluated on the basis of adequacy and fluency, using the human translations as the gold standard. Adequacy refers to the degree to which the translation communicates information present in the original source language text. Fluency refers to the degree to which the translation is well-formed according to the grammar of the target language.
The human translation teams initially submitted five stories, which were returned with feedback before being assigned the rest of the material. Further submissions were continually monitored for quality. Ranking of manual translations was performed by two LDC staff members, one an Arabic-dominant bilingual and the other an English native monolingual. There was overall agreement between the two and minor discrepancies were resolved through discussion and comparison of additional files. The ranking method was unstructured and somewhat casual -- it is not intended to be definitive, or even accountable.
The source and translation data are presented in SGML formatting, and the assessment is presented in a .txt file with comma separated fields containing judgements and identification info.
Samples
For examples of the data in this corpus, please view this Arabic source file (SGML) and its translation (SGML).
Updates
None at this time.