Multi-Metric Optimization Using Ensemble Tuning

Baskaran Sankaran, Anoop Sarkar and Kevin Duh

This paper examines tuning for statistical machine translation (SMT) with respect to multiple evaluation metrics. We propose several novel methods for tuning towards multiple objectives, including some based on 'ensemble decoding' methods. Pareto-optimality is a natural way to think about multi-metric optimization (MMO) and our methods can effectively combine several Pareto-optimal solutions, obviating the need to choose one. Our best performing 'ensemble tuning' method is a new algorithm for multi-metric optimization that searches for Pareto-optimal ensemble models. We study the effectiveness of our methods through experiments on multiple as well as single reference(s) datasets. Our experiments show simultaneous gains across several metrics (BLEU, RIBES), without any significant reduction in other metrics. This contrasts the traditional tuning where gains are usually limited to a single metric. Our human evaluation results confirm that in order to produce better MT output, optimizing multiple metrics is better than optimizing only one.