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Calibration of Encoder Decoder Models for Neural Machine Translation

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arxiv 1903.00802 v1 pith:VA6WDHK6 submitted 2019-03-03 cs.LG cs.CLstat.ML

classification cs.LGcs.CLstat.ML
keywords calibrationmodelsbeam-searchmachineneuraltranslationaccuracyattention
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We study the calibration of several state of the art neural machine translation(NMT) systems built on attention-based encoder-decoder models. For structured outputs like in NMT, calibration is important not just for reliable confidence with predictions, but also for proper functioning of beam-search inference. We show that most modern NMT models are surprisingly miscalibrated even when conditioned on the true previous tokens. Our investigation leads to two main reasons -- severe miscalibration of EOS (end of sequence marker) and suppression of attention uncertainty. We design recalibration methods based on these signals and demonstrate improved accuracy, better sequence-level calibration, and more intuitive results from beam-search.

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Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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    Optimizing the Pearson correlation between hypothesis likelihood and an external quality score during fine-tuning improves LLM translation quality and turns log-likelihood into a competitive reference-free quality estimator.

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