A Post-Editing Dataset in the Legal Domain: Do we Underestimate Neural Machine Translation Quality? (2020)

We introduce a machine translation dataset for three pairs of languages in the legal domain with post-edited high-quality neural machine translation and independent human references. The data was collected as part of the EU APE-QUEST project and comprises crawled content from EU websites with translation from English into three European languages: Dutch, French and Portuguese. Altogether, the data consists of around 31K tuples including a source sentence, the respective machine translation by a neural machine translation system, a post-edited version of such translation by a professional translator, and – where available – the original reference translation crawled from parallel language websites. We describe the data collection process, provide an analysis of the resulting post-edits and benchmark the data using state-of-the-art quality estimation and automatic post-editing models. One interesting by-product of our post-editing analysis suggests that neural systems built with publicly available general domain data can provide high-quality translations, even though comparison to human references suggests that this quality is quite low. This makes our dataset a suitable candidate to test evaluation metrics. The data is freely available as an ELRC-SHARE resource.