Publication Data
Lattice Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation
Abstract: We present Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding over
translation lattices that compactly encode a huge number of translation hypotheses. We
describe conditions on the loss function that will enable efficient implementation of
MBR decoders on lattices. We introduce an approximation to the BLEU
score~\cite{papineni01} that satisfies these conditions. The MBR decoding under this
approximate BLEU is realized using Weighted Finite State Automata. Our experiments show
that the Lattice MBR decoder yields moderate, consistent gains in translation
performance over N-best MBR decoding on Arabic-to-English, Chinese-to-English and
English-to-Chinese translation tasks. We conduct a range of experiments to understand
why Lattice MBR improves upon N-best MBR and also study the impact of various
parameters on MBR performance.
