Improving Sequential Models: Beam Search

As we saw earlier, the generated text can be improved. Now let’s see if beam search might help to improve the performance. The standard way to predict from a language model is by predicting one step at a time and using the prediction from the previous time step as the new input. In beam search, we predict several steps ahead before picking an input.

This enables us to pick output sequences that may not look as attractive if taken individually but are better when considered as a sequence. The way beam search works is by, at a given time, predicting $m^n$ output sequences or beams. $m$ is known as the beam width, and $n$ ...