Unveiling the Power of Source: Source-based Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Neural Machine Translation

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Hauptverfasser: Lyu, Boxuan, Kamigaito, Hidetaka, Funakoshi, Kotaro, Okumura, Manabu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Lyu, Boxuan
Kamigaito, Hidetaka
Funakoshi, Kotaro
Okumura, Manabu
author_facet Lyu, Boxuan
Kamigaito, Hidetaka
Funakoshi, Kotaro
Okumura, Manabu
contents Maximum a posteriori decoding, a commonly used method for neural machine translation (NMT), aims to maximize the estimated posterior probability. However, high estimated probability does not always lead to high translation quality. Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding offers an alternative by seeking hypotheses with the highest expected utility. Inspired by Quality Estimation (QE) reranking which uses the QE model as a ranker we propose source-based MBR (sMBR) decoding, a novel approach that utilizes quasi-sources (generated via paraphrasing or back-translation) as ``support hypotheses'' and a reference-free quality estimation metric as the utility function, marking the first work to solely use sources in MBR decoding. Experiments show that sMBR outperforms QE reranking and the standard MBR decoding. Our findings suggest that sMBR is a promising approach for NMT decoding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11632
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling the Power of Source: Source-based Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Neural Machine Translation
Lyu, Boxuan
Kamigaito, Hidetaka
Funakoshi, Kotaro
Okumura, Manabu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Maximum a posteriori decoding, a commonly used method for neural machine translation (NMT), aims to maximize the estimated posterior probability. However, high estimated probability does not always lead to high translation quality. Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding offers an alternative by seeking hypotheses with the highest expected utility. Inspired by Quality Estimation (QE) reranking which uses the QE model as a ranker we propose source-based MBR (sMBR) decoding, a novel approach that utilizes quasi-sources (generated via paraphrasing or back-translation) as ``support hypotheses'' and a reference-free quality estimation metric as the utility function, marking the first work to solely use sources in MBR decoding. Experiments show that sMBR outperforms QE reranking and the standard MBR decoding. Our findings suggest that sMBR is a promising approach for NMT decoding.
title Unveiling the Power of Source: Source-based Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Neural Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11632