Continuous Rating as Reliable Human Evaluation of Simultaneous Speech Translation
This study addresses the problem of reliable human evaluation methods for SST systems, providing incremental evidence on user preferences and the trade-off between latency and re-translations.
The paper tackled the reliability of Continuous Rating for evaluating simultaneous speech translation (SST) by comparing it with factual questionnaires across judges with varying source language knowledge, finding it is easy and reliable when judges have at least limited knowledge of the source language.
Simultaneous speech translation (SST) can be evaluated on simulated online events where human evaluators watch subtitled videos and continuously express their satisfaction by pressing buttons (so called Continuous Rating). Continuous Rating is easy to collect, but little is known about its reliability, or relation to comprehension of foreign language document by SST users. In this paper, we contrast Continuous Rating with factual questionnaires on judges with different levels of source language knowledge. Our results show that Continuous Rating is easy and reliable SST quality assessment if the judges have at least limited knowledge of the source language. Our study indicates users' preferences on subtitle layout and presentation style and, most importantly, provides a significant evidence that users with advanced source language knowledge prefer low latency over fewer re-translations.