TITLE: Multi-Sentence Resampling: A Simple Approach to Alleviate Dataset Length Bias and Beam-Search Degradation 

ABSTRACT: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is known to suffer from a beam-search
problem: after a certain point, increasing beam size causes an overall drop in
translation quality. This effect is especially pronounced for long sentences.
While much work was done analyzing this phenomenon, primarily for
autoregressive NMT models, there is still no consensus on its underlying cause.
In this work, we analyze errors that cause major quality degradation with large
beams in NMT and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We show that a factor that
strongly contributes to the quality degradation with large beams is
\textit{dataset length-bias} - \textit{NMT datasets are strongly biased towards
short sentences}. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new data augmentation
technique -- \textit{Multi-Sentence Resampling (MSR)}. This technique extends
the training examples by concatenating several sentences from the original
dataset to make a long training example. We demonstrate that MSR significantly
reduces degradation with growing beam size and improves final translation
quality on the IWSTL$15$ En-Vi, IWSTL$17$ En-Fr, and WMT$14$ En-De datasets.
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is known to suffer from a beam-search
problem: after a certain point, increasing beam size causes an overall drop in
translation quality. This effect is especially pronounced for long sentences.
While much work was done analyzing this phenomenon, primarily for
autoregressive NMT models, there is still no consensus on its underlying cause.
In this work, we analyze errors that cause major quality degradation with large
beams in NMT and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We show that a factor that
strongly contributes to the quality degradation with large beams is
\textit{dataset length-bias} - \textit{NMT datasets are strongly biased towards
short sentences}. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new data augmentation
technique -- \textit{Multi-Sentence Resampling (MSR)}. This technique extends
the training examples by concatenating several sentences from the original
dataset to make a long training example. We demonstrate that MSR significantly
reduces degradation with growing beam size and improves final translation
quality on the IWSTL$15$ En-Vi, IWSTL$17$ En-Fr, and WMT$14$ En-De datasets.
Multi-Sentence Resampling: A Simple Approach to Alleviate Dataset Length Bias and Beam-Search Degradation
http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06253v1