Despite the progress in machine translation quality estimation and evaluation in the last years, decoding in neural machine translation (NMT) is mostly oblivious to this and centers around finding the most probable translation according to the model (MAP decoding), approximated with beam search. In this paper, we bring together these two lines of research and propose quality-aware decoding for NMT, by leveraging recent breakthroughs in reference-free and reference-based MT evaluation through various inference methods like $N$-best reranking and minimum Bayes risk decoding. We perform an extensive comparison of various possible candidate generation and ranking methods across four datasets and two model classes and find that quality-aware decoding consistently outperforms MAP-based decoding according both to state-of-the-art automatic metrics (COMET and BLEURT) and to human assessments. Our code is available at https://github.com/deep-spin/qaware-decode.

机器翻译中心于神经机器翻译的MAP解码，本文提出基于近期普及的基于参考文本和无参考文本翻译质量评估研究成果，包括n-best重排序和最小贝叶斯风险解码等，实现了基于质量的神经机器翻译解码，经过多组数据集比较和人工评估，结果表明质量感知的神经机器翻译解码性能优于基于MAP的解码方法，且代码已公开。

神经机器翻译质量感知解码