NLP Machine Translation 2

Question 1

Which decoding strategy in neural MT generates the most probable translation by greedily selecting the highest-probability token at each step?

Accepted Answer

Greedy decoding

Answer

Greedy decoding selects the single highest-probability token at each step without exploring alternatives.

Question 2

What does the BLEU score primarily measure in machine translation evaluation?

Accepted Answer

N-gram precision of the translation against reference(s)

Answer

BLEU measures n-gram precision of the MT output against one or more human reference translations.

Question 3

In the transformer encoder-decoder architecture for MT, what is the role of cross-attention?

Accepted Answer

Allows the decoder to attend to encoder outputs

Answer

Cross-attention in the decoder lets each target position attend over all encoder hidden states to gather source context.

Question 4

Which phenomenon occurs when an NMT model repeatedly generates the same phrase or omits parts of the source sentence?

Accepted Answer

Over-translation and under-translation

Answer

Over-translation (repeated content) and under-translation (omitted content) are common NMT failure modes caused by imperfect attention alignment.

Question 5

What is 'back-translation' used for in low-resource neural machine translation?

Accepted Answer

Generating synthetic source sentences from target monolingual data

Answer

Back-translation uses a reverse MT system to translate target-language monolingual text into the source, creating synthetic parallel data for training.

NLP Practice Test

NLP Practice Test

NLP Machine Translation 2