MetricX-23: The Google Submission to the WMT 2023 Metrics Shared Task

This report details the MetricX-23 submission to the WMT23 Metrics Shared Task and provides an overview of the experiments that informed which metrics were submitted. Our 3 submissions-each with a quality estimation (or reference-free) version-are all learned regression-based metrics that vary in the data used for training and which pretrained language model was used for initialization. We report results related to understanding (1) which supervised training data to use, (2) the impact of how the training labels are normalized, (3) the amount of synthetic training data to use, (4) how metric performance is related to model size, and (5) the effect of initializing the metrics with different pretrained language models. The most successful training recipe for MetricX employs two-stage fine-tuning on DA and MQM ratings, and includes synthetic training data. Finally, one important takeaway from our extensive experiments is that optimizing for both segment- and system-level performance at the same time is a challenging task.