Several uncertainty estimation methods have been recently proposed for machine translation evaluation. While these methods can provide a useful indication of when not to trust model predictions, we show in this paper that the majority of them tend to underestimate model uncertainty, and as a result they often produce misleading confidence intervals that do not cover the ground truth. We propose as an alternative the use of conformal prediction, a distribution-free method to obtain confidence intervals with a theoretically established guarantee on coverage. First, we demonstrate that split conformal prediction can ``correct'' the confidence intervals of previous methods to yield a desired coverage level. Then, we highlight biases in estimated confidence intervals, both in terms of the translation language pairs and the quality of translations. We apply conditional conformal prediction techniques to obtain calibration subsets for each data subgroup, leading to equalized coverage.

本文研究机器翻译的不确定性评估方法，发现目前大多数方法对模型不确定性的估计较低，建议采用分布自由的合规预测法来保证覆盖度，并提出条件合规预测技术来获得每个数据子组的校准子集，从而实现覆盖率均衡。

机器翻译评估的共形化