Hello,

I wonder why the numerical precision used in srilm is off, and how come
this has never turned into a real problem when using inside moses (for
translation)?

It can be shown in toy size dataset that for long test sentences (40 words
let's say) you may get a perplexity by srilm that is 1 points below what it
should actually be having it precisely computed. Assuming that perplexity
is a measure people use for comparing language models, then obviously
relying on what srilm produces for benchmarking purpose is unfair.

I suppose part of this precision problem is due to the fact that these
precomputed counts are being loaded from the arpa files into some hacky
suffix tree/array data structures which demand a lossy coding of
numbers-with-floating-points to keep the size of the data structure
reasonable. Is this the reason, or I am absolutely wrong?

regards,
-K
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