BLEU

BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) is an algorithm used for evaluating the quality of text that has been translated from one language to another. It is a metric for evaluating a generated sentence to a reference sentence. The BLEU score is commonly used in natural language processing to assess the performance of machine translation models.

How BLEU works

A higher BLEU score represents a better match to the source translation. BLEU considers precision, but not recall: it counts the maximal number of times a word in the generated sentence appears in any reference sentence, but it doesn't penalize the generated sentence for missing words from the reference.

BLEU also uses a modified form of precision to ensure that the translated text does not simply consist of common words. This modification is done by applying a penalty to the score, which is proportional to the sentence length.

Further, BLEU takes into account the sequence of words or n-grams (group of 'n' words). For example, comparing two sequences of words of length n, by considering the match of individual words (1-gram), pairs of consecutive words (2-gram), triplets of consecutive words (3-grams), and so on. This enables to capture more contextual and grammatical information.

Despite its simplicity and popularity, BLEU has limitations. It does not consider semantics or meaning: a translation could be nonsensical and still receive a high BLEU score if the words match the reference in some order. Also, it does not scale well with longer sentences due to its precision-oriented nature. Finally, it doesn't handle synonyms or paraphrasing well, as it compares the exact words and not their meanings.

Regardless, BLEU remains a popular choice for quick automated evaluation, especially in machine translation tasks due to its simplicity and speed. It's important to consider other metrics or human evaluation for a comprehensive assessment of translation quality.