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authorChris Dyer <cdyer@cs.cmu.edu>2011-06-06 21:05:46 -0400
committerChris Dyer <cdyer@cs.cmu.edu>2011-06-06 21:05:46 -0400
commit866ae1777a42dfecf1869eb0ebc722c7d8cfc7d0 (patch)
treea443e4555b916d87ba9b5345415bcaf8874740b4 /mteval
parentb8a94025353c844ba1af8049f02749d13f56e015 (diff)
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+TEXT PROTOCOL FOR EXTERNAL EVALUATION CODE
+
+External evaluators may be supplied that use a simple text-based protocol
+that reads commands on STDIN and writes the responses to STDOUT. Commands
+and responses are newline (\n) delimited lines. Important: the evaluator
+process must flush output after processing each line of input.
+
+The evaluator must respond to two kinds of messages: SCORE and EVAL, named
+after the first field.
+
+
+1. SCORE messages
+
+A SCORE message includes a set of one or more
+reference translations of a segment as well as a hypothesis translation of
+the same segment and indicates the evaluator should return a vector of sufficient
+statistics.
+
+ Examples:
+ SCORE ||| this is reference 1 ||| this is reference 2 ||| this is reference 3 ||| this is the hypothesis
+ SCORE ||| this is a single reference . ||| here is the hypothesis !
+
+1.1. SCORE response
+
+The response to a score message is a vector of floats representing the
+sufficient statistics. *The framework code assumes that sufficient statistics
+linearly decompose across hypothesis*, that is, that they may be vector
+added. Furthermore, a single evaluator must always return the same
+number of values, since each position in the vector is assumed to have a fixed
+semantics. (For example, a BLEU evaluator might define position to be the
+counts of 1-gram hits.)
+
+ Examples responses:
+ 8 6 3 2 10 10 10 10 12.7 10
+ -2 1.32421 54 3 -1.2e-13
+
+
+2. EVAL messages
+
+An EVAL message requests that the evaluator convert a vector of sufficient
+statistics into a scalar metric (typically between 0 and 1, but this is not
+enforced). The order of the sufficient statistics will be the same
+ Examples:
+ EVAL ||| 8 6 3 2 10 10 10 10 12.7 10
+ EVAL ||| 0 0 -2 1.32 0
+
+2.1 EVAL response
+
+The eval response is a single float value. Output must be flushed after
+writing it.
+
+ Example responses:
+ 0.67
+ 0.445323324
+ 0
+ 1.245e-12
+