# Unsupervised Translation Quality Estimation Exploiting Synthetic Data and Pre-trained Multilingual Encoder

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05117 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05117/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07834/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Quality Estimation for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10608/) (2020)
- [CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06243/) (2022)
- [Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation in Many Languages via Zero-Shot Paraphrasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14564/) (2020)
- [TransQuest: Translation Quality Estimation with Cross-lingual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01536/) (2020)
- [Quality Estimation without Human-labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04020/) (2021)
- [QEMind: Alibaba's Submission to the WMT21 Quality Estimation Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14890/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Translation quality estimation (TQE) is the task of predicting translation quality without reference translations. Due to the enormous cost of creating training data for TQE, only a few translation directions can benefit from supervised training. To address this issue, unsupervised TQE methods have been studied. In this paper, we extensively investigate the usefulness of synthetic TQE data and pre-trained multilingual encoders in unsupervised sentence-level TQE, both of which have been proven effective in the supervised training scenarios. Our experiment on WMT20 and WMT21 datasets revealed that this approach can outperform other unsupervised TQE methods on high- and low-resource translation directions in predicting post-editing effort and human evaluation score, and some zero-resource translation directions in predicting post-editing effort.