We study a problem with pairwise ranking optimization (PRO): that it tends to yield too short translations. We find that this is partially due to the inadequate smoothing in PRO’s BLEU+1, which boosts the precision component of BLEU but leaves the brevity penalty unchanged, thus destroying the balance between the two, compared to BLEU. It is also partially due to PRO optimizing for a sentence-l...

Academic writing is a critical skill distinct from creative writing. While brevity is vital, clarity in writing reflects clarity of thought. This paper is a primer for novice academic writers.

15 evaluate the correction term for each triple in the left side of table 1, but for brevity of exposition we will evaluate this term only for a sample of each class (T 2 and T 4).