Tree Kernels for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

This paper describes Uppsala University’s submissions to the Quality Estimation (QE) shared task at WMT 2012. We present a QE system based on Support Vector Machine regression, using a number of explicitly defined features extracted from the Machine Translation input, output and models in combination with tree kernels over constituency and dependency parse trees for the input and output sentences. We confirm earlier results suggesting that tree kernels can be a useful tool for QE system construction especially in the early stages of system design.