A novel string-to-string distance measure with applications to machine translation evaluation

TLDR: The authors introduced a string-to-string distance measure which extends the edit distance by block transpositions as constant cost edit operation and demonstrated how this distance measure can be used as an evaluation criterion in machine translation.

Abstract: We introduce a string-to-string distance measure which extends the edit distance by block transpositions as constant cost edit operation. An algorithm for the calculation of this distance measure in polynomial time is presented. We then demonstrate how this distance measure can be used as an evaluation criterion in machine translation. The correlation between this evaluation criterion and human judgment is systematically compared with that of other automatic evaluation measures on two translation tasks. In general, like other automatic evaluation measures, the criterion shows low correlation at sentence level, but good correlation at system level.