NIST

National Institute of Standards and Technology


NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is a metric for automatic evaluation of machine translation that calculates the similarity between a machine translation output and a reference translation using n-grams precision.

NIST is an adaptation of BLEU.

Compared to BLEU, NIST gives more importance to the less frequent n-grams.

The NIST metric is derived from the BLEU evaluation criterion but differs in one fundamental aspect: instead of n-gram precision, the information gain from each n-gram is taken into account.

Interpreting BLEU/NIST Scores: How Much Improvement Do We Need to Have a Better System?

Resources


Want to learn more about NIST?


Edit this article →

Machine Translate is created and edited by contributors like you!

Learn more about contributing →

Licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Cite this article →