{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/beyond-bleu-training-neural-machine","title":"Beyond BLEU: Training Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Similarity","arxiv_id":"1909.06694","date":"2019-09-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["John Wieting","Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick","Kevin Gimpel","Graham Neubig"],"abstract":"While most neural machine translation (NMT) systems are still trained using maximum likelihood estimation, recent work has demonstrated that optimizing systems to directly improve evaluation metrics such as BLEU can substantially improve final translation accuracy. However, training with BLEU has some limitations: it doesn't assign partial credit, it has a limited range of output values, and it can penalize semantically correct hypotheses if they differ lexically from the reference. In this paper, we introduce an alternative reward function for optimizing NMT systems that is based on recent work in semantic similarity. We evaluate on four disparate languages translated to English, and find that training with our proposed metric results in better translations as evaluated by BLEU, semantic similarity, and human evaluation, and also that the optimization procedure converges faster. Analysis suggests that this is because the proposed metric is more conducive to optimization, assigning partial credit and providing more diversity in scores than BLEU.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06694v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06694v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"beyond-bleu-training-neural-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/jwieting/beyond-bleu","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"nmt","task_name":"NMT"},{"task_slug":"semantic-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Similarity"},{"task_slug":"semantic-textual-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Textual Similarity"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.06694","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1909.06694"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/jwieting/beyond-bleu","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"listed":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"42a15af2b53456bd","entry":"make_example","repo":"jwieting/beyond-bleu","repo_kind":"listed","path":"evaluate.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jwieting/beyond-bleu/blob/HEAD/evaluate.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NOASSERTION","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"42a15af2b53456bd"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}