Expected sequence similarity maximization

This paper presents efficient algorithms for expected similarity maximization, which coincides with minimum Bayes decoding for a similarity-based loss function. Our algorithms are designed for similarity functions that are sequence kernels in a general class of positive definite symmetric kernels. We discuss both a general algorithm and a more efficient algorithm applicable in a common unambiguous scenario. We also describe the application of our algorithms to machine translation and report the results of experiments with several translation data sets which demonstrate a substantial speed-up. In particular, our results show a speed-up by two orders of magnitude with respect to the original method of Tromble et al. (2008) and by a factor of 3 or more even with respect to an approximate algorithm specifically designed for that task. These results open the path for the exploration of more appropriate or optimal kernels for the specific tasks considered.