Efficient Minimum Error Rate Training and Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for translation hypergraphs and lattices

Abstract

Minimum Error Rate Training (MERT) and Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding are used in most current state-of-the-art Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems. The algorithms were originally developed to work with N-best lists of translations, and recently extended to lattices that encode many more hypotheses than typical N-best lists. We here extend lattice-based MERT and MBR algorithms to work with hypergraphs that encode a vast number of translations produced by MT systems based on Synchronous Context Free Grammars. These algorithms are more efficient than the lattice-based versions presented earlier. We show how MERT can be employed to optimize parameters for MBR decoding. Our experiments show speedups from MERT and MBR as well as performance improvements from MBR decoding on several language pairs. © 2009 ACL and AFNLP.