Packing it all up in search for a language independent MT quality measure tool

This study describes usage of a particular implementation of Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) as a machine translation quality evaluation tool. NCD has been introduced and tested for clustering and classification of different types of data and found a reliable and general tool. As far as we know NCD in its Complearn implementation has not been evaluated as a MT quality tool yet, and we wish to show that it can also be used for this purpose. We show that NCD scores given for MT outputs in different languages correlate highly with scores of a state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics, METEOR 0.6. Our experiments are based on translations between one source and three target languages with a smallish sample that has available reference translations, UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Results of the paper are preliminary, but very promising. We have also begun a large scale evaluation of NCD as an MT metric with WMT-08 Shared Task Evaluation Data.