BLEU Score
Category: Protocols & Standards
Category: Protocols & Standards
Definition
BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) Score is the standard automatic metric for evaluating machine translation quality by comparing generated translations to human references.
How It Works
BLEU calculates precision of n-grams (word sequences) between machine translation and reference translations. It applies a brevity penalty to discourage overly short translations.
The score ranges from 0 to 1, with higher scores indicating better translation quality.
Why It Matters
BLEU enables rapid iteration in translation model development without expensive human evaluation. It's the primary metric for comparing translation systems across languages.
Despite limitations, BLEU remains the industry standard due to its simplicity and reasonable correlation with human judgment.
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