Assessing Crosslingual Discourse Relations in Machine Translation

In an attempt to improve overall translation quality, there has been an increasing focus on integrating more linguistic elements into Machine Translation (MT). While significant progress has been achieved, especially recently with neural models, automatically evaluating the output of such systems is still an open problem. Current practice in MT evaluation relies on a single reference translation, even though there are many ways of translating a particular text, and it tends to disregard higher level information such as discourse. We propose a novel approach that assesses the translated output based on the source text rather than the reference translation, and measures the extent to which the semantics of the discourse elements (discourse relations, in particular) in the source text are preserved in the MT output. The challenge is to detect the discourse relations in the source text and determine whether these relations are correctly transferred crosslingually to the target language -- without a reference translation. This methodology could be used independently for discourse-level evaluation, or as a component in other metrics, at a time where substantial amounts of MT are online and would benefit from evaluation where the source text serves as a benchmark.