Home › Glossary › Evaluation › BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy)

Intermediate · Evaluation

BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy)

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. A metric to evaluate machine translation quality by comparing generated text to human references based on N-gram overlap.

Technical Definition

A metric to evaluate machine translation quality by comparing generated text to human references based on N-gram overlap.

How it works

BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) is a widely used metric for assessing the quality of machine-generated translations. It calculates a score based on how many sequences of words (N-grams) in the machine's output match those in human-created reference translations.

Related Concepts

  • Natural language processing (NLP) — A field of AI enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
  • Machine Translation — The automatic translation of text or speech from one natural language to another using AI.
  • Evaluation Metrics — Quantitative measures used to assess the performance, accuracy, and quality of AI models for specific tasks.

Further Reading

  • Google ML Glossary