Wat heb je gezegd? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Translations with Variational Transformers

We use epistemic uncertainty to detect out-of-training-distribution sentences in Neural Machine Translation. For this, we develop a measure of uncertainty designed specifically for long sequences of discrete random variables, corresponding to the words in the output sentence. This measure is able to convey epistemic uncertainty akin to the Mutual Information (MI), which is used in the case of single discrete random variables such as in classification.