Moses-support Digest, Vol 104, Issue 57

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Major bug found in Moses (Read, James C)
2. Re: Major bug found in Moses (Read, James C)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2015 16:21:46 +0000
From: "Read, James C" <jcread@essex.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
To: amittai axelrod <amittai@umiacs.umd.edu>, Lane Schwartz
<dowobeha@gmail.com>
Cc: "moses-support@mit.edu" <moses-support@mit.edu>, Philipp Koehn
<phi@jhu.edu>
Message-ID:
<DB3PR06MB0713C28F165A33251B2A311E85A40@DB3PR06MB0713.eurprd06.prod.outlook.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2"

If I'm ever at a conference I'll come and introduce myself right after you present to all those present that:

1) A well designed search algorithm should select low quality translations despite the fact that the search space contains much higher quality translations.

I can't deal with this level of denial.

James

________________________________________
From: amittai axelrod <amittai@umiacs.umd.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 5:33 PM
To: Read, James C; Lane Schwartz
Cc: moses-support@mit.edu; Philipp Koehn
Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses

* "[i'm] the guy that says. Well here's a stroke of genius."
* "a public display of en-masse reluctance to acknowledge that such is
an undesirable quality of the system" ?
* "resorting to censorship not only in the literature but also on a
public mailing list rather than acknowledge point 2" ?

heh -- i was right the first time:

On 6/17/15 13:20, amittai axelrod wrote:
> also, your argument could be easily mis-interpreted as "this behavior
is unexpected to me, ergo this is unexpected behavior", and that will
unfortunately bias the listener against you, as that is the preferred
argument structure of conspiracy theorists.

see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)#Common_characteristics_of_cranks

if you're ever at a conference, say hi. until then, well, you do you.
~amittai


On 6/19/15 10:12, Read, James C wrote:
> So we've gone from
>
>
> 1) Acknowledging that the search algorithm performs poorly with no LM,
> tuning or pruning despite the fact the search space clearly contains
> high quality translations
>
> 2) to a public display of en-masse reluctance to acknowledge that such
> is an undesirable quality of the system
>
> 3) to resorting to censorship not only in the literature but also on a
> public mailing list rather than acknowledge point 2.
>
>
> And your conclusion is that after being a witness to such behaviour I
> would still have a desire to contribute to this field?!? Why YES. I
> would love to keep banging my head against a brick wall. I have no other
> preferred past times.
>
>
> James
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Lane Schwartz <dowobeha@gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Friday, June 19, 2015 5:04 PM
> *To:* Read, James C
> *Cc:* Philipp Koehn; Burger, John D.; moses-support@mit.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
> James,
>
> You may see the techniques that exist as outdated, wrong-headed, and
> inefficient. You have the right to hold that opinion. It may even be
> that history proves you right. Progress in science is made by people
> posing questions - often questions that challenge the status quo - and
> then doing experiments to answer those questions.
>
> However, it is incumbent upon you, the proponent of a new idea, to
> design good experiments to attempt to prove or disprove your new
> hypothesis. Dispassionately showing the relative merits and shortcomings
> of your technique with the existing state of the art is part of that
> process.
>
> I, along with numerous other people on this list, have attempted in good
> faith to answer your questions, and to provide you with our perspective
> based on our collective understanding of the problem.
>
> You, in turn, have responded belligerently.
>
> I suggest that you have a frank conversation with your academic advisor
> or other appropriate mentor regarding your future. If you intend to
> pursue a successful career in science, academia, government, or
> industry, you would do well to reconsider the manner in which you
> interact with other people, especially people with whom you disagree.
>
> In the meantime, I would respectfully request that until you learn how
> to respectfully interact with other adults that you refrain from posting
> to this mailing list.
>
> Sincerely,
> Lane Schwartz
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 8:45 AM, Read, James C <jcread@essex.ac.uk
> <mailto:jcread@essex.ac.uk>> wrote:
>
> According to your book which I have on my desk the job of the TM is
> to model the most likely translations and the job of the decoder is
> to intelligently search the space of translations to find the most
> likely one/s (I'm paraphrasing of course).
>
>
> Would you like to retract that position and republish a next edition
> of your book which openly states that Moses when used with no LM or
> tuning or pruning can and should be expected to perform very poorly
> and select only the least likely translations?
>
>
> Don't you in the slightest find it worrying that like at least 90%
> of you code base could be thrown out of the window and high scoring
> results can be obtained with a simple phrase pair based rule based
> system?
>
>
> Which would you prefer? Would you prefer to consume computational
> resources calculating probabilites or get straight to the answer
> with simple logic and low computational requirements?
>
>
> BE HONEST!
>
>
> James
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* moses-support-bounces@mit.edu
> <mailto:moses-support-bounces@mit.edu>
> <moses-support-bounces@mit.edu
> <mailto:moses-support-bounces@mit.edu>> on behalf of Philipp Koehn
> <phi@jhu.edu <mailto:phi@jhu.edu>>
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 18, 2015 9:39 PM
> *To:* Burger, John D.
> *Cc:* moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:moses-support@mit.edu>
>
> *Subject:* Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
> Hi,
>
> I am great fan of open source software, but there is a danger to
> view its inner workings as a black box - which leads to the
> strange theories of what is going on, instead of real understanding.
> But we can try to understand it.
>
> In the reported experiment, the language model was removed,
> while the rest of the system was left unchanged.
>
> The default untuned weights that train-model.perl assigns to a
> model are the following:
>
> WordPenalty0= -1
> PhrasePenalty0= 0.2
> TranslationModel0= 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2
> Distortion0= 0.3
>
> Since no language model is used, a positive distortion cost will
> lead the decoder to not use any reordering at all. That's a
> good thing in this case.
>
> The word penalty is used to counteract the language model's
> preference for short translations. Unchecked, there is now a
> bias towards too long translations.
>
> Then there is the translation model with its equal weights for
> p(e|f) and p(f|e). The p(e|f) weight and scores are fine and well.
> However, p(f|e) only make sense if you have the Bayes theorem
> in your mind and a language model in your back. But in the
> reported setup, there is now a bias to translate into rare English
> phrases, since these will have high p(f|e) scores.
>
> My best guess is that the reported setup translates common
> function words (such as prepositions) into very long rare English
> phrases - word penalty likes it, p(f|e) likes it, p(e|f) does not mind
> enough - which produces a lot of rubbish.
>
> By filtering for p(e|f) those junky phrases are removed from the
> phrase table, restricting the decoder to more reasonable choices.
>
> I content that this is not a bug in the software, but a bug in usage.
>
> -phi
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Burger, John D. <john@mitre.org
> <mailto:john@mitre.org>> wrote:
>
> On Jun 17, 2015, at 11:54, Read, James C <jcread@essex.ac.uk
> <mailto:jcread@essex.ac.uk>> wrote:
>
> > The question remains why isn't the system capable of finding the most likely translations without the LM?
>
> Even if it weren't ill-posed, I don't find this to be an
> interesting question at all. This is like trying to improve
> automobile transmissions by disabling the steering. These are
> the parts we have, and they all work together.
>
> It's not as if human translators don't use their own internal
> language models.
>
> - John Burger
> MITRE
>
> > Evidently, if you filter the phrase table then the LM is not
> as important as you might feel. The question remains why isn't
> the system capable of finding the most likely translations
> without the LM? Why do I need to filter to help the system find
> them? This is undesirable behaviour. Clearly a bug.
> >
> > I include the code I used for filtering. As you can see the
> 4th score only was used as a filtering criteria.
> >
> > #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> > #
> > # Program filters phrase table to leave only phrase pairs
> > # with probability above a threshold
> > #
> > use strict;
> > use warnings;
> > use Getopt::Long;
> >
> > my $phrase;
> > my $min;
> > my $phrase_table;
> > my $filtered_table;
> >
> > GetOptions( 'min=f' => \$min,
> > 'out=s' => \$filtered_table,
> > 'in=s' => \$phrase_table);
> > die "ERROR: must give threshold and phrase table input file
> and output file\n" unless ($min && $phrase_table &&
> $filtered_table);
> > die "ERROR: file $phrase_table does not exist\n" unless (-e
> $phrase_table);
> > open (PHRASETABLE, "<$phrase_table") or die "FATAL: Could not
> open phrase table $phrase_table\n";;
> > open (FILTEREDTABLE, ">$filtered_table") or die "FATAL: Could
> not open phrase table $filtered_table\n";;
> >
> > while (my $line = <PHRASETABLE>)
> > {
> > chomp $line;
> > my @columns = split ('\|\|\|', $line);
> >
> > # check that file is a well formatted phrase table
> > if (scalar @columns < 4)
> > {
> > die "ERROR: input file is not a well
> formatted phrase table. A phrase table must have at least four
> colums each column separated by |||\n";
> > }
> >
> > # get the probability and check it is less than the
> threshold
> > my @scores = split /\s+/, $columns[2];
> > if ($scores[3] > $min)
> > {
> > print FILTEREDTABLE $line."\n";;
> > }
> > }
> >
> >
> >
> > From: Matt Post <post@cs.jhu.edu <mailto:post@cs.jhu.edu>>
> > Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:25 PM
> > To: Read, James C
> > Cc: Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt;moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:moses-support@mit.edu>; Arnold, Doug
> > Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
> >
> > I think you are misunderstanding how decoding works. The highest-weighted translation of each source phrase is not necessarily the one with the best BLEU score. This is why the decoder retains many options, so that it can search among them (together with their reorderings). The LM is an important component in making
> these selections.
> >
> > Also, how did you weight the many probabilities attached to each phrase (to determine which was the most probable)? The tuning phase of decoding selects weights designed to optimize BLEU score. If you weighted them evenly, that is going to exacerbate this experiment.
> >
> > matt
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Jun 17, 2015, at 10:22 AM, Read, James C <jcread@essex.ac.uk <mailto:jcread@essex.ac.uk>> wrote:
> >>
> >> All I did was break the link to the language model and then perform filtering. How is that a methodoligical mistake? How else would one test the efficacy of the TM in isolation?
> >>
> >> I remain convinced that this is undersirable behaviour and therefore a bug.
> >>
> >> James
> >>
> >>
> >> From: Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt <junczys@amu.edu.pl <mailto:junczys@amu.edu.pl>>
> >> Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:12 PM
> >> To: Read, James C
> >> Cc: Arnold, Doug;moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:moses-support@mit.edu>
> >> Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
> >>
> >> Hi James
> >> No, not at all. I would say that is expected behaviour. It's how search spaces and optimization works. If anything these are methodological mistakes on your side, sorry. You are doing weird thinds to the decoder and then you are surprised to get weird results from it.
> >> W dniu 2015-06-17 16:07, Read, James C napisa?(a):
> >>>
> >>> So, do we agree that this is undersirable behaviour and therefore a bug?
> >>>
> >>> James
> >>>
> >>> From: Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt <junczys@amu.edu.pl <mailto:junczys@amu.edu.pl>>
> >>> Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 5:01 PM
> >>> To: Read, James C
> >>> Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
> >>>
> >>> As I said. With an unpruned phrase table and an decoder that just optmizes some unreasonble set of weights all bets are off, so if you get very low BLEU point there, it's not surprising. It's probably jumping around in a very weird search space. With a pruned phrase table you restrict the search space VERY
> strongly. Nearly everything that will be produced is a
> half-decent translation. So yes, I can imagine that would happen.
> >>> Marcin
> >>> W dniu 2015-06-17 15:56, Read, James C napisa?(a):
> >>> You would expect an improvement of 37 BLEU points?
> >>>
> >>> James
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> From: Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt <junczys@amu.edu.pl
> <mailto:junczys@amu.edu.pl>>
> >>> Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 4:32 PM
> >>> To: Read, James C
> >>> Cc: Moses-support@mit.edu <mailto:Moses-support@mit.edu>;
> Arnold, Doug
> >>> Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
> >>>
> >>> Hi James,
> >>> there are many more factors involved than just probability,
> for instance word penalties, phrase penalities etc. To be able
> to validate your own claim you would need to set weights for all
> those non-probabilities to zero. Otherwise there is no hope that
> moses will produce anything similar to the most probable
> translation. And based on that there is no surprise that there
> may be different translations. A pruned phrase table will
> produce naturally less noise, so I would say the behaviour you
> describe is quite exactly what I would expect to happen.
> >>> Best,
> >>> Marcin
> >>> W dniu 2015-06-17 15:26, Read, James C napisa?(a):
> >>> Hi all,
> >>>
> >>> I tried unsuccessfully to publish experiments showing this
> bug in Moses behaviour. As a result I have lost interest in
> attempting to have my work published. Nonetheless I think you
> all should be aware of an anomaly in Moses' behaviour which I
> have thoroughly exposed and should be easy enough for you to
> reproduce.
> >>>
> >>> As I understand it the TM logic of Moses should select the
> most likely translations according to the TM. I would therefore
> expect a run of Moses with no LM to find sentences which are the
> most likely or at least close to the most likely according to
> the TM.
> >>>
> >>> To test this behaviour I performed two runs of Moses. One
> with an unfiltered phrase table the other with a filtered phrase
> table which left only the most likely phrase pair for each
> source language phrase. The results were truly startling. I
> observed huge differences in BLEU score. The filtered phrase
> tables produced much higher BLEU scores. The beam size used was
> the default width of 100. I would not have been surprised in the
> differences in BLEU scores where minimal but they were quite high.
> >>>
> >>> I have been unable to find a logical explanation for this
> behaviour other than to conclude that there must be some kind of
> bug in Moses which causes a TM only run of Moses to perform
> poorly in finding the most likely translations according to the
> TM when there are less likely phrase pairs included in the race.
> >>>
> >>> I hope this information will be useful to the Moses
> community and that the cause of the behaviour can be found and
> rectified.
> >>>
> >>> James
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> 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
>
>
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>
>
>
>
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> far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel
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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2015 16:28:20 +0000
From: "Read, James C" <jcread@essex.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses
To: Lane Schwartz <dowobeha@gmail.com>
Cc: "moses-support@mit.edu" <moses-support@mit.edu>, Philipp Koehn
<phi@jhu.edu>
Message-ID:
<DB3PR06MB07138C7466F186AC8901C8A085A40@DB3PR06MB0713.eurprd06.prod.outlook.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I did not claim that the paper does so. The weakness has been exposed. And the way it was exposed suggests that certain classes of phrase pairs contribute more to BLEU scores than others. We now have an empirical basis for exploring new avenues that exploit this observation.

I have no problem with papers being rejected. Clearly only a certain number can be published in any particular setting.

What I take issue with is the en-masse denial that there is a problem with the system if it behaves in such a way with no LM + no pruning and/or tuning.

I am happy that you seem to be the first person to acknowledge that this is undesirable behaviour. I feel that we are finally making some progress. Now if more people could acknowledge that their is a problem perhaps we could set about improving the situation.

James

________________________________
From: Lane Schwartz <dowobeha@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 6:10 PM
To: Read, James C
Cc: Philipp Koehn; Burger, John D.; moses-support@mit.edu
Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses

James,

1) Acknowledging that the search algorithm performs poorly with no LM, tuning or pruning despite the fact the search space clearly contains high quality translations

Yes. We all acknowledge this. If you have a better technique, that's great. Show that it's better. Your paper does not do so.


2) to a public display of en-masse reluctance to acknowledge that such is an undesirable quality of the system

Yes, this is undesirable. If you have a better technique, that's great. Show that it's better. Your paper does not do so.


3) to resorting to censorship not only in the literature but also on a public mailing list rather than acknowledge point 2.

No one is trying to censor you in the literature. You wrote a paper that got rejected. Lots of papers get rejected. Lots of GOOD papers get rejected. The fact that yours got rejected does not mean that you're being censored.

No one is trying to censor you on this list. We are simply requesting that you conduct yourself like a well-mannered adult engaged in scientific research.


By the way, your frequent mentions of investors are very much a non sequitur. You may be looking for investors, and that's fine if you are. You may want to keep in mind that not everyone is. Many of us are interested in this as a field of scientific enquiry.


Lane
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