Tokenized BLEU considered harmful - Discussion on community-based process
I think @bittlingmayer is referring to Figure 6 in http://statmt.org/wmt19/pdf/53/WMT02.pdf .  When you look at Appendix A there are some cases where metrics fall apart at the high end and some where they correlate well.  en-zh is arguably production-quality.  

This could evolve into a metrics Bazaar where the value add is really the packaging and consistency: it installs/compiles the metrics for me, gives a reproducible name to use in publication (involve the authors; you don't want a different sacrebleu hash system), a version number, and evaluation of the metrics like http://ufallab.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~bojar/wmt19-metrics-task-package.tgz but run when code changes rather than once a year.  
https://github.com/huggingface/nlp/blob/7d1526dfeeb29248d832f1073192dbf03ad642da/metrics/bleu/bleu.py#L76 assumes the inputs are tokenized by the user.  This is bad practice because the user's tokenizer is usually not the same as the one used by `mteval-v13a.pl`, the closest thing we have to a standard.  Moreover, tokenizers are like window managers: they can be endlessly customized and nobody has quite the same options.  

As @mjpost reported in https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-6319.pdf BLEU configurations can vary by 1.8.  Yet people are incorrectly putting non-comparable BLEU scores in the same table, such as Table 1 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04902 .  

There are a few use cases for tokenized BLEU like Thai.  For Chinese, people seem to use character BLEU for better or worse.

The default easy option should be the one that's correct more often.  And that is sacrebleu.  Please don't make it easy for people to run what is usually the wrong option; it definitely shouldn't be `bleu`.  

Also, I know this is inherited from TensorFlow and, paging @lmthang, they should discourage it too.  
Tokenized BLEU considered harmful - Discussion on community-based process 
 https://github.com/huggingface/nlp/blob/7d1526dfeeb29248d832f1073192dbf03ad642da/metrics/bleu/bleu.py#L76 assumes the inputs are tokenized by the user.  This is bad practice because the user's tokenizer is usually not the same as the one used by `mteval-v13a.pl`, the closest thing we have to a standard.  Moreover, tokenizers are like window managers: they can be endlessly customized and nobody has quite the same options.  

As @mjpost reported in https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-6319.pdf BLEU configurations can vary by 1.8.  Yet people are incorrectly putting non-comparable BLEU scores in the same table, such as Table 1 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04902 .  

There are a few use cases for tokenized BLEU like Thai.  For Chinese, people seem to use character BLEU for better or worse.

The default easy option should be the one that's correct more often.  And that is sacrebleu.  Please don't make it easy for people to run what is usually the wrong option; it definitely shouldn't be `bleu`.  

Also, I know this is inherited from TensorFlow and, paging @lmthang, they should discourage it too.   
 I think @bittlingmayer is referring to Figure 6 in http://statmt.org/wmt19/pdf/53/WMT02.pdf .  When you look at Appendix A there are some cases where metrics fall apart at the high end and some where they correlate well.  en-zh is arguably production-quality.  

This could evolve into a metrics Bazaar where the value add is really the packaging and consistency: it installs/compiles the metrics for me, gives a reproducible name to use in publication (involve the authors; you don't want a different sacrebleu hash system), a version number, and evaluation of the metrics like http://ufallab.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~bojar/wmt19-metrics-task-package.tgz but run when code changes rather than once a year.  