RESEARCH

SPEECH & AUDIO

Analyzing Uncertainty in Neural Machine Translation

July 13, 2018

Abstract

Machine translation is a popular test bed for research in neural sequence-to-sequence models but despite much recent research, there is still a lack of understanding of these models. Practitioners report performance degradation with large beams, the under-estimation of rare words and a lack of diversity in the final translations. Our study relates some of these issues to the inherent uncertainty of the task, due to the existence of multiple valid translations for a single source sentence, and to the extrinsic uncertainty caused by noisy training data. We propose tools and metrics to assess how uncertainty in the data is captured by the model distribution and how it affects search strategies that generate translations. Our results show that search works remarkably well but that models tend to spread too much probability mass over the hypothesis space. Next, we propose tools to assess model calibration and show how to easily fix some shortcomings of current models. As part of this study, we release multiple human reference translations for two popular benchmarks.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Myle Ott

David Grangier

Marc'Aurelio Ranzato

Michael Auli

Publisher

ICML

Related Publications

June 27, 2025

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

CONVERSATIONAL AI

Seamless Interaction: Dyadic Audiovisual Motion Modeling and Large-Scale Dataset

Vasu Agrawal, Akinniyi Akinyemi, Kathryn Alvero, Morteza Behrooz, Julia Buffalini, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Joy Chen, Junming Chen, Zhang Chen, Shiyang Cheng, Praveen Chowdary, Joe Chuang, Antony D'Avirro, Jon Daly, Ning Dong, Mark Duppenthaler, Cynthia Gao, Jeff Girard, Martin Gleize, Sahir Gomez, Hongyu Gong, Srivathsan Govindarajan, Brandon Han, Sen He, Denise Hernandez, Yordan Hristov, Rongjie Huang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Somya Jain, Raj Janardhan, Qingyao Jia, Christopher Klaiber, Dejan Kovachev, Moneish Kumar, Hang Li, Yilei Li, Pavel Litvin, Wei Liu, Guangyao Ma, Jing Ma, Martin Ma, Xutai Ma, Lucas Mantovani, Sagar Miglani, Sreyas Mohan, Louis-Philippe Morency, Evonne Ng, Kam-Woh Ng, Tu Anh Nguyen, Amia Oberai, Benjamin Peloquin, Juan Pino, Jovan Popovic, Omid Poursaeed, Fabian Prada, Alice Rakotoarison, Alexander Richard, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Vasu Sharma, Alex Shcherbyna, Jie Shen, Anastasis Stathopoulos, Anna Sun, Paden Tomasello, Tuan Tran, Arina Turkatenko, Bo Wan, Chao Wang, Jeff Wang, Mary Williamson, Carleigh Wood, Tao Xiang, Yilin Yang, Zhiyuan Yao, Chen Zhang, Jiemin Zhang, Xinyue Zhang, Jason Zheng, Pavlo Zhyzheria, Jan Zikes, Michael Zollhoefer

June 27, 2025

June 13, 2025

FAIRNESS

INTEGRITY

Measuring multi-calibration

Ido Guy, Daniel Haimovich, Fridolin Linder, Nastaran Okati, Lorenzo Perini, Niek Tax, Mark Tygert

June 13, 2025

June 11, 2025

RESEARCH

COMPUTER VISION

IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments

Florian Bordes, Quentin Garrido, Justine Kao, Adina Williams, Mike Rabbat, Emmanuel Dupoux

June 11, 2025

June 11, 2025

RESEARCH

COMPUTER VISION

A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs

Benno Krojer, Mojtaba Komeili, Candace Ross, Quentin Garrido, Koustuv Sinha, Nicolas Ballas, Mido Assran

June 11, 2025

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.