Document-Level Text Generation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding using Optimal Transport

Yuu Jinnai


Abstract
Document-level text generation tasks are known to be more difficult than sentence-level text generation tasks as they require an understanding of longer context to generate high-quality texts. In this paper, we investigate the adaptation of Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding for document-level text generation tasks. MBR decoding makes use of a utility function to estimate the output with the highest expected utility from a set of candidate outputs. Although MBR decoding is shown to be effective in a wide range of sentence-level text generation tasks, its performance on document-level text generation tasks is limited, as many of the utility functions are designed for evaluating the utility of sentences. To this end, we propose MBR-OT, a variant of MBR decoding using Wasserstein distance to compute the utility of a document using a sentence-level utility function. The experimental result shows that the performance of MBR-OT outperforms that of the standard MBR in document-level machine translation, text simplification, and dense image captioning tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1370
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28260–28279
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1370/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuu Jinnai. 2025. Document-Level Text Generation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding using Optimal Transport. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 28260–28279, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Document-Level Text Generation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding using Optimal Transport (Jinnai, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1370.pdf