Word
beam search
Definition
n. a search method that keeps track of several promising paths at once to find the best complete sequence.
n. a heuristic graph search algorithm that explores a decision tree by expanding only a predetermined number (beam width) of most promising candidate sequences at each step.
Examples
“The translation program used beam search to find the most natural English sentence.”
“Speech recognition software relies on beam search to explore competing phonetic interpretations simultaneously.”
“While beam search optimizes cumulative probability effectively, it frequently suffers from repetitive degeneration when applied to open-ended creative generation.”
Examples
simple
“The translation program used beam search to find the most natural English sentence.”
contextual
“Speech recognition software relies on beam search to explore competing phonetic interpretations simultaneously.”
complex
“While beam search optimizes cumulative probability effectively, it frequently suffers from repetitive degeneration when applied to open-ended creative generation.”
Real-World Examples
“NMT is then using a simple left-to right beam-search decoder to generate new translations that approximately maximize the trained conditional probability.” “Beam search is a fast and empirically effective method for translation decoding, but it lacks formal guarantees about search error.” Etymology
Coined in the 1970s by Raj Reddy and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University for speech recognition systems (Harpy), evoking a search beam sweeping through candidate paths.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Domains
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/beam-search