Uses
A beam search is most often used to maintain tractability in large systems with insufficient amount of memory to store the entire search tree. For example, it is used in many machine translation systems. To select the best translation, each part is processed, and many different ways of translating the words appear. The top best translations according to their sentence structures are kept and the rest are discarded. The translator then evaluates the translations according to a given criteria, choosing the translation which best keeps the goals. The first use of a beam search was in the Harpy Speech Recognition System, CMU 1976.
Read more about this topic: Beam Search