Case context: You are building a German-to-English translation system. For one test sentence, the model produces an output translation Tbad instead of the correct translation Tgood. When you run a score-checking test, you discover that Tgood receives a lower score than Tbad.

Question: Which part of the system should you investigate and improve, and why?

Sample answer: The component to investigate is the scoring function. Since the correct translation Tgood got a lower score than the incorrect translation Tbad, the score function is ranking the wrong output higher. That means the search procedure is not the main issue, because even if it had found Tgood, the flawed scoring rule would still have preferred Tbad.

Key points:

• The scoring function is the part that needs attention.
• The incorrect translation was ranked above the correct one.
• The search algorithm is not the primary cause because it depends on the scoring function.

Rubric: A complete response must identify the scoring function as the problem and explain that it incorrectly assigns a better score to the bad translation than to the true translation.