NIST is a method for
evaluating the quality of text which has been translated using
machine translation. Its name comes from the US
National Institute of Standards and Technology
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...
.
It is based on the
BLEU metric, but with some alterations. Where
BLEU simply calculates
n-gram precision adding equal weight to each one, NIST also calculates how informative a particular
n-gram is. That is to say when a correct
n-gram is found, the rarer that n-gram is, the more weight it will be given.
For example, if the bigram "on the" is correctly matched, it will receive lower weight than the correct matching of bigram "interesting calculations", as this is less likely to occur.
NIST also differs from
BLEU in its calculation of the brevity penalty insofar as small variations in translation length do not impact the overall score as much.
See also
*
BLEU
*
F-Measure
*
METEOR
A meteor, known colloquially as a shooting star, is a glowing streak of a small body (usually meteoroid) going through Earth's atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere,
creating a ...
*
Noun-phrase chunking
*
ROUGE (metric)
*
Word error rate (WER)
References
NIST 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation Official Results
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Evaluation of machine translation