Linguistic Quality Assurance Symposium, Zürich, Switzerland

Raw Output Evaluator, a freeware tool for manually assessing MT raw output

Raw Output Evaluator is a freeware tool, which runs under Microsoft Windows. It allows quality evaluators to compare and manually assess raw outputs from different machine translation engines. The outputs may be assessed in comparison to each other and to other translations of the same input source text, and in absolute terms using standard industry metrics or ones designed specifically by the evaluators themselves. The errors found may be highlighted using various colours. Thanks to a built-in stopwatch, the same program can also be used as a simple post-editing tool in order to compare the time required to post-edit MT output with how long it takes to produce an unaided human translation of the same input text. The MT outputs may be imported into the tool in a variety of formats, or pasted in from the PC Clipboard. The project files created by the tool may also be exported and re-imported in several file formats. Raw Output Evaluator was developed for use during a postgraduate course module on machine translation and post-editing.