BLEU Score Calculator

Calculate BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores for translation and text generation

What is BLEU Score?

BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) is a metric for evaluating machine translation quality. It measures how similar a generated text is to a reference text by comparing n-gram overlaps.

BLEU scores range from 0 to 1 (or 0 to 100 when expressed as percentages), where higher scores indicate better matches with the reference.

How BLEU Works

1

N-gram Precision

Count matching n-grams (1-4 words) between hypothesis and reference.

2

Clipped Counts

Clip n-gram counts to prevent gaming by repeating words.

3

Brevity Penalty

Penalize translations that are too short compared to reference.

4

Geometric Mean

Combine precisions using geometric mean for final score.

Score Interpretation

ScoreQualityInterpretation
>60ExcellentHigh quality, near-human translation
40-60GoodUnderstandable, mostly accurate
20-40FairGist is preserved, rough translation
<20PoorLow similarity to reference

Limitations of BLEU

BLEU only measures surface-level n-gram overlap. It doesn't capture meaning, fluency, or semantic equivalence. A paraphrase may have low BLEU despite being a good translation.

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