探索温度约束下的非确定性机器翻译,提升译文多样性与质量。
On Temperature-Constrained Non-Deterministic Machine Translation: Potential and Evaluation
- 引入温度约束的非确定性翻译机制,生成更丰富的译文候选。
- 发现非确定性翻译在温度控制下可产生更高质量的译文结果。
- 提出新评估策略ExpectoSample,解决多候选译文排名混乱问题。
近年来,语言模型的非确定性特性受到广泛关注,并对实际应用产生显著影响。然而,这一特性在机器翻译(MT)这一复杂且非确定性的自然语言处理任务中仍缺乏深入研究。本文系统评估现代MT系统,识别出温度约束下的非确定性机器翻译(ND-MT)为一种独特现象。实验表明,ND-MT在应对长期困扰MT研究的多模态问题上具有显著潜力,且在温度约束下生成的译文质量优于确定性机器翻译(D-MT)。但与此同时,传统针对D-MT设计的评估框架在应用于ND-MT时无法保持评价一致性。通过在不同采样规模下使用词汇与语义指标评估先进ND-MT系统,发现存在‘分桶效应’:系统排名主要由最差候选译文决定。为此,本文提出ExpectoSample策略,先筛选可靠评估指标,再实现鲁棒的ND-MT系统选择,适用于真实场景部署。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In recent years, the non-deterministic properties of language models have garnered considerable attention and have shown a significant influence on real-world applications. However, such properties remain under-explored in machine translation (MT), a complex, non-deterministic NLP task. In this study, we systematically evaluate modern MT systems and identify temperature-constrained Non-Deterministic MT (ND-MT) as a distinct phenomenon. Additionally, we demonstrate that ND-MT exhibits significant potential in addressing the multimodality issue that has long challenged MT research and provides higher-quality candidates than Deterministic MT (D-MT) under temperature constraints. However, ND-MT introduces new challenges in evaluating system performance. Specifically, the evaluation framework designed for D-MT fails to yield consistent evaluation results when applied to ND-MT. We further investigate this emerging challenge by evaluating state-of-the-art ND-MT systems using both lexical-based and semantic-based metrics at varying sampling sizes. The results reveal a Buckets Effect across these systems: the ranking of ND-MT systems is dominated by the worst-quality candidate translation, as shown by automatic evaluation metrics. To mitigate this issue, we propose ExpectoSample, a strategy that first identifies reliable metrics and then enables robust ND-MT system selection for real-world.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。