MaxSD: A Neural Machine Translation Evaluation Metric Optimized by Maximizing Similarity Distance

We propose a novel metric for machine translation evaluation based on neural networks. In the training phrase, we maximize the distance between the similarity scores of high and low-quality hypotheses. Then, the trained neural network is used to evaluate the new hypotheses in the testing phase. The proposed metric can efficiently incorporate lexical and syntactic metrics as features in the network and thus is able to capture different levels of linguistic information. Experiments on WMT-14 show state-of-the-art performance is achieved in two out of five language pairs on the system-level and one on the segment-level. Comparative results are also achieved in the remaining language pairs.