Paper ID: 2406.11632

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

Boxuan Lyu, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura

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 (\citealp{kumar2004minimum}) offers an alternative by seeking hypotheses with the highest expected utility. In this paper, we show that Quality Estimation (QE) reranking (\citealp{fernandes-etal-2022-quality}), which uses a QE model as a reranker, can be viewed as a variant of MBR. Inspired by this, we propose source-based MBR (sMBR) decoding, a novel approach that utilizes synthetic sources (generated via back-translation or paraphrasing) 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.

Submitted: Jun 17, 2024