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Breaking the Beam Search Curse: A Study of (Re-)Scoring Methods and Stopping Criteria for Neural Machine Translation

Yilin Yang, Liang Huang, Mingbo Ma


Abstract
Beam search is widely used in neural machine translation, and usually improves translation quality compared to greedy search. It has been widely observed that, however, beam sizes larger than 5 hurt translation quality. We explain why this happens, and propose several methods to address this problem. Furthermore, we discuss the optimal stopping criteria for these methods. Results show that our hyperparameter-free methods outperform the widely-used hyperparameter-free heuristic of length normalization by +2.0 BLEU, and achieve the best results among all methods on Chinese-to-English translation.
Anthology ID:
D18-1342
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3054–3059
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1342
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1342
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yilin Yang, Liang Huang, and Mingbo Ma. 2018. Breaking the Beam Search Curse: A Study of (Re-)Scoring Methods and Stopping Criteria for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3054–3059, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Breaking the Beam Search Curse: A Study of (Re-)Scoring Methods and Stopping Criteria for Neural Machine Translation (Yang et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1342.pdf