We present a pairwise learning-to-rank approach to machine translation evaluation that learns to differentiate better from worse translations in the context of a given reference. We integrate several layers of linguistic information encapsulated in tree-based structures, making useof both the reference and the system output simultaneously, thus bringing our ranking closer to how humans evaluate translations. Most importantly, instead of deciding upfront which types of featuresare important, we use the learning framework of preference re-ranking kernels to learn the features automatically. The evaluation results showthat learning in the proposed framework yields better correlation with humans than computing the direct similarity over the same type of structures. Also,we show our structural kernel learning (SKL) can be a general framework for MT evaluation, in which syntactic and semantic information can be naturally incorporated.