xSIM++: An Improved Proxy to Bitext Mining Performance for Low-Resource
  Languages
Mingda Chen Kevin Heffernan Onur Çelebi Alex Mourachko Holger Schwenk
We introduce a new proxy score for evaluating bitext mining based on
similarity in a multilingual embedding space: xSIM++. In comparison to xSIM,
this improved proxy leverages rule-based approaches to extend English sentences
in any evaluation set with synthetic, hard-to-distinguish examples which more
closely mirror the scenarios we encounter during large-scale mining. We
validate this proxy by running a significant number of bitext mining
experiments for a set of low-resource languages, and subsequently train NMT
systems on the mined data. In comparison to xSIM, we show that xSIM++ is better
correlated with the downstream BLEU scores of translation systems trained on
mined bitexts, providing a reliable proxy of bitext mining performance without
needing to run expensive bitext mining pipelines. xSIM++ also reports
performance for different error types, offering more fine-grained feedback for
model development.