Z-MERT: A Fully Configurable Open Source Tool for Minimum Error Rate Training of Machine Translation Systems
We introduce Z-MERT, a software tool for minimum error rate training of machine translation systems (Och, 2003). In addition to being an open source tool that is extremely easy to compile and run, Z-MERT is also agnostic regarding the evaluation metric, fully configurable, and requires no modification to work with any decoder. We describe Z-MERT and review its features, and report the results of a series of experiments that examine the tool's runtime. We establish that Z-MERT is extremely efficient, making it well-suited for time-sensitive pipelines. The experiments also provide an insight into the tool's runtime in terms of several variables (size of the development set, size of produced N-best lists, etc).
Minimum Error Rate Training for Bilingual News Alignment
