gsarti/qe4pe
Quality Estimation for Post-Editing (QE4PE) For more details on QE4PE, see our paper and our Github repository Gabriele Sarti • Vilém Zouhar • Grzegorz Chrupała • Ana Guerberof Arenas • Malvina Nissim • Arianna Bisazza Word-level quality estimation (QE) detects erroneous spans in machine translations, which can direct and facilitate human post-editing. While the accuracy of word-level QE systems has been assessed extensively, their usability and downstream influence on… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/gsarti/qe4pe.
Quality Estimation for Post-Editing (QE4PE)
For more details on QE4PE, see our [paper](https://huggingface.co/papers/2503.03044) and our [Github repository](https://github.com/gsarti/qe4pe)
Dataset Description
- Source: Github
- Paper: Arxiv
- Point of Contact: Gabriele Sarti
Gabriele Sarti • Vilém Zouhar • Grzegorz Chrupała • Ana Guerberof Arenas • Malvina Nissim • Arianna Bisazza
<p float="left"> <img src="https://github.com/gsarti/qe4pe/blob/main/figures/highlevel_qe4pe.png?raw=true" alt="QE4PE annotation pipeline" width=400/> </p>
Word-level quality estimation (QE) detects erroneous spans in machine translations, which can direct and facilitate human post-editing. While the accuracy of word-level QE systems has been assessed extensively, their usability and downstream influence on the speed, quality and editing choices of human post-editing remain understudied. Our QE4PE study investigates the impact of word-level QE on machine translation (MT) post-editing in a realistic setting involving 42 professional post-editors across two translation directions. We compare four error-span highlight modalities, including supervised and uncertainty-based word-level QE methods, for identifying potential errors in the outputs of a state-of-the-art neural MT model. Post-editing effort and productivity are estimated by behavioral logs, while quality improvements are assessed by word- and segment-level human annotation. We find that domain, language and editors' speed are critical factors in determining highlights' effectiveness, with modest differences between human-made and automated QE highlights underlining a gap between accuracy and usability in professional workflows.
Dataset Summary
This dataset provides a convenient access to the processed pretask, main and posttask splits and the questionnaires for the QE4PE study. A sample of challenging documents extracted from WMT23 evaluation data were machine translated from English to Italian and Dutch using NLLB 3.3B, and post-edited by 12 translators per direction across 4 highlighting modalities employing various word-level quality estimation (QE) strategies to present translators with potential errors during the editing. Additional details are provided in the main task readme and in our paper. During the post-editing, behavioral data (keystrokes, pauses and editing times) were collected using the GroTE online platform. For the main task, a subset of the data was annotated with Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) by professional annotators.
We publicly release the granular editing logs alongside the processed dataset to foster new research on the usability of word-level QE strategies in modern post-editing workflows.
News 📢
March 2025: The QE4PE paper is available on Arxiv.
January 2025: MQM annotations are now available for the main task.
October 2024: The QE4PE dataset is released on the HuggingFace Hub! 🎉
Repository Structure
The repository is organized as follows:
qe4pe/
├── questionnaires/ # Configs and results for pre- and post-task questionnaires for translators
│ ├── pretask_results.csv # Results of the pretask questionnaire, corresponding to the `pretask_questionnaire` configuration
│ ├── posttask_highlight_results.csv # Results of the posttask questionnaire for highlighted modalities, corresponding to the `posttask_highlight_questionnaire` configuration
│ ├── posttask_no_highlight_results.csv # Results of the posttask questionnaire for the `no_highlight` modality, corresponding to the `posttask_no_highlight_questionnaire` configuration
│ └── ... # Configurations reporting the exact questionnaires questions and options.
├── setup/
│ ├── highlights/ # Outputs of word-level QE strategies used to setup highlighted spans in the tasks
│ ├── qa/ # MQM/ESA annotations for the main task
│ ├── processed/ # Intermediate outputs of the selection process for the main task
│ └── wmt23/ # Original collection of WMT23 sources and machine-translated outputs
└── task/
├── example/ # Example folder with task structure
├── main/ # Main task data, logs, outputs and guidelines
│ ├── ...
│ ├── processed_main.csv # Processed main task data, corresponds to the `main` configuration
│ └── README.md # Details about the main task
├── posttask/ # Posttask task data, logs, outputs and guidelines
│ ├── ...
│ ├── processed_main.csv # Processed posttask task data, corresponds to the `posttask` configuration
│ └── README.md # Details about the post-task
└── pretask/ # Pretask data, logs, outputs and guidelines
├── ...
├── processed_pretask.csv # Processed pretask data, corresponds to the `pretask` configuration
└── README.md # Details about the pretaskLanguages
The language data of QE4PE is in English (BCP-47 en), Italian (BCP-47 it) and Dutch (BCP-47 nl).
Dataset Structure
Data Instances
The dataset contains two configurations, corresponding to the two tasks: pretask, main and posttask. main contains the full data collected during the main task and analyzed during our experiments. pretask contains the data collected in the initial verification phase before the main task, in which all translators worked on texts highlighted in the supervised modality. posttask contains the data collected in the final phase in which all translators worked on texts in the no_highlight modality.
Data Fields
A single entry in the dataframe represents a segment (~sentence) in the dataset, that was machine-translated and post-edited by a professional translator. The following fields are contained in the training set:
Data Splits
Train Split
The train split contains the totality of triplets (or pairs, when translation from scratch is performed) annotated with behavioral data produced during the translation.
The following is an example of the subject oracle_t1 post-editing for segment 3 of doc20 in the eng-nld direction of the main task. The fields mt_pe_word_aligned and mt_pe_char_aligned are shown over three lines to provide a visual understanding of their contents.
{
# Identification
"unit_id": "qe4pe-main-eng-nld-20-3-oracle_t1",
"wmt_id": "doc5",
"wmt_category": "biomedical",
"doc_id": 20,
"segment_in_doc_id": 3,
"segment_id": 129,
"translator_pretask_id": "t4",
"translator_main_id": "oracle_t1",
"src_lang": "eng",
"tgt_lang": "nld",
"highlight_modality": "oracle",
# Text statistics
"src_num_chars": 104,
"mt_num_chars": 136,
"pe_num_chars": 106,
"src_num_words": 15,
"mt_num_words": 16,
"pe_num_words": 16,
# Edits statistics
"num_words_insert": 0,
"num_words_delete": 0,
"num_words_substitute": 1,
"num_words_unchanged": 15,
"tot_words_edits": 1,
"wer": 0.0625,
"num_chars_insert": 0,
"num_chars_delete": 0,
"num_chars_substitute": 6,
"num_chars_unchanged": 100,
"tot_chars_edits": 6,
"cer": 0.0566,
# Translation quality
"mt_bleu_max": 100.0,
"mt_bleu_min": 7.159,
"mt_bleu_mean": 68.687,
"mt_bleu_std": 31.287,
"mt_chrf_max": 100.0,
"mt_chrf_min": 45.374,
"mt_chrf_mean": 83.683,
"mt_chrf_std": 16.754,
"mt_ter_max": 100.0,
"mt_ter_min": 0.0,
"mt_ter_mean": 23.912,
"mt_ter_std": 29.274,
"mt_comet_max": 0.977,
"mt_comet_min": 0.837,
"mt_comet_mean": 0.94,
"mt_comet_std": 0.042,
"mt_xcomet_qe": 0.985,
"mt_xcomet_errors": "[]",
"pe_bleu_max": 100.0,
"pe_bleu_min": 11.644,
"pe_bleu_mean": 61.335,
"pe_bleu_std": 28.617,
"pe_chrf_max": 100.0,
"pe_chrf_min": 53.0,
"pe_chrf_mean": 79.173,
"pe_chrf_std": 13.679,
"pe_ter_max": 100.0,
"pe_ter_min": 0.0,
"pe_ter_mean": 28.814,
"pe_ter_std": 28.827,
"pe_comet_max": 0.977,
"pe_comet_min": 0.851,
"pe_comet_mean": 0.937,
"pe_comet_std": 0.035,
"pe_xcomet_qe": 0.984,
"pe_xcomet_errors": "[]",
# Behavioral data
"doc_num_edits": 103,
"doc_edit_order": 20,
"doc_edit_time": 118,
"doc_edit_time_filtered": 118,
"doc_keys_per_min": 52.37,
"doc_chars_per_min": 584.24,
"doc_words_per_min": 79.83,
"segment_num_edits": 9,
"segment_edit_order": 3,
"segment_edit_time": 9,
"segment_edit_time_filtered": 9,
"segment_keys_per_min": 60.0,
"segment_chars_per_min": 906.67,
"segment_words_per_min": 106.67,
"num_enter_actions": 2,
"remove_highlights": False,
# Texts and annotations
"src_text": "The speed of its emerging growth frequently outpaces the development of quality assurance and education.",
"mt_text": "De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en onderwijs.",
"mt_text_highlighted": "De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak <minor>sneller</minor> dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en <major>onderwijs.</major>",
"pe_text": "De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en opleiding.",
"mt_pe_word_aligned": "MT: De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en onderwijs.\n" \
"PE: De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en opleiding.\n" \
" S",
"mt_pe_char_aligned": "MT: De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en onderwijs.\n" \
"PE: De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en opleiding.\n" \
" SS SS SS ",
"highlights": """[
{
'text': 'sneller',
'severity': 'minor',
'start': 43,
'end': 50
},
{
'text': 'onderwijs.',
'severity': 'major',
'start': 96,
'end': 106
}
]"""
# QA annotations
"qa_mt_annotator_id": 'qa_nld_3',
"qa_pe_annotator_id": 'qa_nld_1',
"qa_mt_esa_rating": 100.0,
"qa_pe_esa_rating": 80.0,
"qa_mt_annotated_text": "De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en onderwijs.",
"qa_pe_annotated_text": "De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en opleiding.",
"qa_mt_fixed_text": "De snelheid van de opkomende groei is vaak sneller dan de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en onderwijs.",
"qa_pe_fixed_text": "De snelheid van de ontluikende groei overtreft vaak de ontwikkeling van kwaliteitsborging en onderwijs.",
"qa_mt_mqm_errors": "[]",
"qa_pe_mqm_errors": """[
{
"text": "opkomende",
"text_start": 19,
"text_end": 28,
"correction":
"ontluikende",
"correction_start": 19,
"correction_end": 30,
"description": "Mistranslation - not the correct word",
"mqm_category": "Mistranslation",
"severity": "Minor",
"comment": "",
"edit_order": 1
}
]"""
}The text is provided as-is, without further preprocessing or tokenization.
Dataset Creation
The datasets were parsed from GroTE inputs, logs and outputs for the QE4PE study, available in this repository. Processed dataframes using the qe4pe process_task_data command. Refer to the QE4PE Github repository for additional details. The overall structure and processing of the dataset were inspired by the DivEMT dataset.
QA Annotations
MQM annotations were collected using Google Sheets and highlights were parsed from HTML exported output, ensuring their compliance with well-formedness checks. Out of the original 51 docs (324 segments) in main, 24 docs (10 biomedical, 14 social, totaling 148 segments) were samples at random and annotated by professional translators.
Additional Information
Metric signatures
The following signatures correspond to the metrics reported in the processed dataframes:
# Computed using SacreBLEU: https://github.com/mjpost/sacrebleu
BLEU: case:mixed|eff:yes|tok:13a|smooth:exp|version:2.3.1
ChrF: case:mixed|eff:yes|nc:6|nw:0|space:no|version:2.3.1
TER: case:lc|tok:tercom|norm:no|punct:yes|asian:no|version:2.3.1
# Computed using Unbabel COMET: https://github.com/Unbabel/COMET
Comet: Python3.11.9|Comet2.2.2|fp32|Unbabel/wmt22-comet-da
XComet: Python3.10.12|Comet2.2.1|fp32|Unbabel/XCOMET-XXLDataset Curators
For problems related to this 🤗 Datasets version, please contact me at gabriele.sarti996@gmail.com.
Citation Information
@misc{sarti-etal-2024-qe4pe,
title={{QE4PE}: Word-level Quality Estimation for Human Post-Editing},
author={Gabriele Sarti and Vilém Zouhar and Grzegorz Chrupała and Ana Guerberof-Arenas and Malvina Nissim and Arianna Bisazza},
year={2025},
eprint={2503.03044},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03044},
}