I've been thinking about the issue of nondeterminism and am somewhat concerned because typically MT results/papers give just a single performance figure for each system. As there is an element of nondeterministic behaviour, it would seem prudent to run several repeats of each system and give mean and standard deviation information instead. Of course, this has a practicality trade-off, so an investigation is warranted to determine the scale of the problem. Is anyone interested in collaborating on a paper or CL squib to address the issue, and bring it to the attention of the MT community (and CL community at large)?
Suzy On 25/03/11 11:58 AM, Tom Hoar wrote: > We pick the random set from across the entire collection of documents. > The documents are retrieved as the file system orders them (not > alphabetically sorted). Your comment, "picked in consecutive order" is > interesting. I've often wondered if the order could affect a system's > performance. It's easy enough for me to randomize both the collection > line order and the test set line order. > > The large variance in BLEU would normally be alarming, but this is on a > very small sample corpus of only 40,000 lines. We use the sample corpus > to validate the system installs properly. We haven't seen such large > variations in multi-million pair corpora, but they do range 2-4 BLEU > points. > > Tom > > > -----Original Message----- > *From*: Hieu Hoang <hieuho...@gmail.com > <mailto:hieu%20hoang%20%3chieuho...@gmail.com%3e>> > *To*: moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:moses-support@mit.edu> > *Subject*: Re: [Moses-support] Nondeterminism during decoding: same > config, different n-best lists > *Date*: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:43:49 +0000 > > There may be some systematic differences between the randomly choosen > test sets, eg. the sentences are from the same documents 'cos they were > picked in consecutive order from a multi-doc corpus. Otherwise, I'll be > worried about such a large BLEU variation. > > > > also, see here on the evils of MERT > http://www.mail-archive.com/moses-support@mit.edu/msg00216.html > > > On 24/03/2011 16:06, Tom Hoar wrote: >> We often run multiple trainings on the exact same bitext corpus but >> pull different random samples for each run. We've observed drastically >> different BLEU scores between different runs with BLEUs ranging from >> 30 to 45. This is from exactly the same training data except for the >> randomly-pulled tuning and evaluation sets. We've assumed this >> difference is due to both the random differences in the sets, floating >> point variations between various machines and not using >> --predictable-seeds. >> >> Tom >> >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> *From*: Hieu Hoang <hieuho...@gmail.com >> <mailto:hieu%20hoang%20%3chieuho...@gmail.com%3e>> >> *Reply-to*: h...@hoang.co.uk <mailto:h...@hoang.co.uk> >> *To*: John Burger <j...@mitre.org >> <mailto:john%20burger%20%3cj...@mitre.org%3e>> >> *Cc*: Moses-support <moses-support@mit.edu >> <mailto:moses-support%20%3cmoses-supp...@mit.edu%3e>> >> *Subject*: Re: [Moses-support] Nondeterminism during decoding: same >> config, different n-best lists >> *Date*: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:51:48 +0000 >> >> there's little differences in floating point between OS and gcc >> versions. One of the regression test fails because of rounding errors, >> depending on which machine you run it on. Other than truncating the >> scores, there's not a lot we can do. >> >> The mert perl scripts also dabbles in the scores and that may be >> another source of divergence >> >> On 24 March 2011 15:07, John Burger <j...@mitre.org >> <mailto:j...@mitre.org>> wrote: >> >> Lane Schwartz wrote: >> >> > I've examined the n-best lists, and it seems there are at least a >> > couple of interesting cases. In the simplest case, several >> > translations of a given sentence produce the exact same score, and >> > these tied translations appear in different order during different >> >> > runs. This is a bit odd, but [not] terribly worrisome. The stranger >> > case is when there are two different decoding runs, and for a given >> > sentence, there are translations that appear only in run A, and >> > different translations that only appear in run B. >> >> >> Both these cases are relevant to something we've occasionally seen, >> which is non-determinism during =tuning=. This is not surprising >> given the above, since tuning of course involves decoding. It's hard >> to reproduce, but we have sometimes seen very different weights coming >> out of MERT for the exact same system configurations. The problem >> here is that even very small differences in tuning can result in >> substantial differences in test results, because of how twitchy >> BLEU is. >> >> Like many folks, we typically run MERT on a cluster. This brings up >> another source of non-determinism we've theorized about. Some of our >> clusters are heterogenous, and we've wondered if there might be minor >> differences in floating point behavior from machine to machine. The >> assignment of different chunks of the tuning data to different >> machines is typically non-deterministic, so this might carry over to >> the actual weights that come out of MERT. >> >> Does anyone know how robust the floating point usage in the decoder is >> under these circumstances? >> >> Thanks. >> >> - John Burger >> MITRE >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Moses-support mailing list >> Moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:Moses-support@mit.edu> >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Moses-support mailing list >> Moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:Moses-support@mit.edu> >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Moses-support mailing list >> Moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:Moses-support@mit.edu> >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support > _______________________________________________ > Moses-support mailing list > Moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:Moses-support@mit.edu> > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Moses-support mailing list > Moses-support@mit.edu > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support -- Suzy Howlett http://www.showlett.id.au/ _______________________________________________ Moses-support mailing list Moses-support@mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support
