Minimum Bayes-risk System Combination

We present minimum Bayes-risk system combination, a method that integrates consensus decoding and system combination into a unified multi-system minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) technique. Unlike other MBR methods that re-rank translations of a single SMT system, MBR system combination uses the MBR decision rule and a linear combination of the component systems’ probability distributions to search for the minimum risk translation among all the finite-length strings over the output vocabulary. We introduce expected BLEU, an approximation to the BLEU score that allows to efficiently apply MBR in these conditions. MBR system combination is a general method that is independent of specific SMT models, enabling us to combine systems with heterogeneous structure. Experiments show that our approach bring significant improvements to single-system-based MBR decoding and achieves comparable results to different state-of-the-art system combination methods.